THE CONCEPT OF CHARACTER IN THE MAJOR NOVELS OF D. H.

LAWRENCE

By

Donald Roger Eastman III

A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
1971

FLORID';

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For providing me with the financial benefits of an

NDEA Title IV Fello\/ship for three years,

thank the American taxpayer.
For their countless efforts to teach

would like to

ine

what it means
I

to be a member of a true community of scholars,

v/ould

like to thank Mr. Vincent Leitch and Professor V/ard Hell-

strom.
For their unconditional affection and loyalty,
I

thank

my parents and my wife.

Alien is pedibus ambulamus

11

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABSTRACT
Chapter
I

ii

iv

THE S TUDY OF THOMAS HARDY LITERARY PRINCIPLES

II

HARDY INTO LAWRENCE: THE MOLD

CfLVNGING

.40

III

CONNECTING THE OLD AND THE NEW: A STUDY OF THE CHARACTERS OF THE RAINBOW
THE CHARACTERS OF WORLD'S END: WOMEN IN LOVE

72

IV

112

FROM ART TO AXIOM: LESSER NOVELS

.

LAWRENCE'S
153
169

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

181

111

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Council o the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

THE CONCEPT OF CHARACTER IN THE MAJOR NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

By

Donald Roger Eastman III

December, 1971

Ward Hellstrom Chairman: English Major Department:

In order to create

the new kind of novel seen in The

,

Rainbow and Women in Love

D.

H.

Lawrence developed a now

kind of character, "another ego, according to whose action

theindivida4-~is^unrecognisable
(

and passes through

allotropic states." jThis study attempts to trace the

development of that new form of charactery from its germi-

nation in Sons and Lovers and development in The Rainbow

to its culmination in
V/

omen in Love

The

S tudy

of Thomas Hardy (1914) provides an expository

commentary on Lawrence's primary interest in character and

in the primal, cosmic forces which motivate and govern

character.

Focusing on

tlie

Study

the first chapter of my

dissertation outlines the central principles of Lawrence's

theory of aesthetics, particularly those related to characte:

IV

But the St udy not only pi^ovides a set of literary principles

from which Lawrence takes his departure in

Tlie

Rainbow and

Women in Love; it is also an indirect commentary on Sons

and Lovers.
In the second chapter,
tlien,
I

use Lawrence's

criticism of Hardy to reveal the central indebtedness of

that novel to Hardy's Jude the Obscure
.

The characters of

Sons and Lovers are apparently adopted from Thomas Hardy

and adapted to Lawrence's personal world view.

There is

sense in

\\rhich

Lawrence rewrites Hardy to his own satisclose analysis of

tlie

faction, as

Study and Sons and

Lovers makes clear.

Chapters III and IV deal xvith the characters of The

Rainbov\?

and Women in Love

respectively.

These characters
S ons

grow out of the character types established in

Lovers
Study.
,

and

and develop along the lines established in the Hardy

While there is

continual modification and rework-

ing of these types, there is nonetheless a pattern of philo-

sophical and aesthetic development which culminates in the

typed, "fated" characters of Women in Love
.

Lawrence is

seen to emploviJiajca.cter types from other Hardy novels,

froni^'lnythic

characters

"^and

analogues, and from his own pre-

vious

WT~k;.SL^

Often se,veral opposing types are combined in

one cbiaracter (such as Gerald Critch, who is both Dionysus and Apollo)
,

in order to dram.atize the internal conflicts

of the character.

The psychic disposition of

character

has always, for Lawrence, profound implications not only

for the fate of the individual, but for the future of society
as

well.

Defining these implications is the major interpre-

tative burden of this dissertation.

Chapter V examines Lav/rence's demise as

ist after Women in Love
,

major novel-

and finds the chief problem of the

later novels to lie in

tlie

author's inability to allow

character to rise above its metaphysical, or allegorical,

burden.

Ironically, the very failures of art Lawrence sees

in Hardy and Tolstoi in the Study prove his own downfall as

we 1

VI

CHAPTER

THE STUDY OF THOmS HARDY LITERARY PRINCIPLES

have been, and I have returned. have mounted up on the wings of the morning, and I have dredged down to the zenith's reversal. Which is my way, being man. God may stay in mid-heaven, the Son of Man has climbed to the Whitsun zenith, But I, Matthev>f, being a man Am a traveller back and forth.
I I

So be it.
D. H.

Lawrence, St. Matthew

it

"Tlie

state does not want to be;

wants

to survive."

John Fowles, The Aristos

In the essay "Surgery for the Novel -- or a Bomb,"

first published in April, 1923,

D.

H.

Lawrence proclaimed
The new direction

the function and mode of the new novel.

of fiction should not adopt the "absorbedly self-conscious,

senile-precocious" form of Joyce and Proust.

Lawrence

called for a return to the form of the Platonic Dialogues,

to a combination of fiction and metaphysic,

and this re-

turn required for Lawrence a new conception of character.

The recombination of art and philosophy should be effected
in order to "preseat us
'.vith

new, really new feelings, a

whole line of new emotion, wliich

v/iil

get us out of the

emotional rut":
It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when fiction and philosophy got They used to be one, right from the split. Then they went and parted, days of myth. like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy The two should come towent abstract-dry. gether again -- in the novel.
In the Study of Thomas Hardy
,

the central formulation of

the Laurentian motaphysic, the same directions for the

novel are outlined:

It is the novelists and dramatists wlio have the hardest task in reconciling their metaphysic, their theory of being and knowing, with their living sense of being. Because a novel is a microcosm, and because man in viewing the universe must view it in light of a theory, therefore every novel must have the background or the structural skeleton of some theory of being, some metaphysic. 2

The concluding sentences of the paragraph are crucial:

"But the metaphysic must always subserve the artistic pur-

pose beyond the artist's conscious aim.

Otherv/ise the

novel becomes

treatise."

Lawrence's "most pretentious

critical work," as Edward McDonald calls the Study of

Thomas Hardy
,

is not only an attempt to formulate a phi-

losophy of "being and knov/ing," it is also Lawrence's

effort to work out his own literary principles of the novel,
to articulate how the novel works, .or should v/ork.

Law-

rence is, above

all.,

an artist;

and the effort to construct

metaphysical system is at all times

prolegomena to the
The
,

construction o an artistic base for his fiction.

entire Study
,

running to 118 pages in the Phoenix

leads

to a conceptual framework of what the "supreme art" will

be and, more importantly, how that art will be generated

in the novel.

The Study's focus on character is evident from Law-

rence's first liiention of it in

1914,
to

letter written on July 15,

Edward Marsh:
3

"I

am going to write a little book

on Hardy's people."

The Study of Thomas Hardy is, as LawB.

rence himself wrote to J.

Pinker on September 5th,

It will,

"about anything but Thomas Hardy."

in fact, be

primarily about

Lav'/rence,

as he admits to Amy Lowell in a

"I

letter of November 18th:

am finishing a book,

supposed

to be on Tnomas Hardy, but in reality a sort of Confession

of my Heart."

The initial center of concentration, how.

ever, is maintained throughout the Study

Whenever the

art of Hardy is considered (in three of the Study's ten

chapters), the focus rests squarely on "Hardy's people,"

on character.

Calling Lustacia and Clym or Tess and Jude

"people" rather than characters is natural for Lawrence,

and indicative of his esthetic principles:

Lawrence does

not make sharp distinctions between the laws of life and those of art.
For Lawrence, art is art because it pro-

vides vantage points from v/hich to view Life, vantage

points

'vv'hich

are inaccessible in real life.

This is the

implication of Lawrence's vindicative comments on the "unreasonable tilings"

that Hardy's characters do.
a

Throughout his work, Lawrence had

the novel could do what it
lias

conviction that
He

never done in the past.

a

believed that the novel could be both

a

prophetic book and

Thus in the
,

testing ground for metaphysical hypotheses.

famous ninth chapter of Lady Chatterley's Lover

he says

that "here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly

handled.

It can inform and lead into nev/ places

the flow

of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sym-

pathy away in recoil from things gone dead."

In a sense

the novel is a laboratory in v/hich the artist works out

the possibilities of liuman life through his characters.

At the center of the Study, then, is character, in

both the metaphysical and literary concerns of the essay.

As Lawrence's most exhaustive essay en this subject,
the

Study must be recognized as

most important aid to under-

standing Lawrence's developing concept of character.

Furthermore, the proximity of the composition of the Study
to Lawrence's major novels makes the com.ments of the

form-

er particularly pertinent to the latter.

As George H.

Ford has said, "it is commonly noted that Lawrence's de-

scriptions of English landscape resemble those of Hardy,

yet the real affinity is a more significant one.
In his

perceptive (although garrulous) essay on his much admired

predecessor, Lawrence's analysis of Hardy's view of human

T^elationships often seems to be an analysis of his own

novels.

What he said of Hardy's heroes and heroines

7

applies even more fittingly to his own."

argue in this study, liowever,
is

What

shall

not that the Study of

Thomas Hardy presents the precise critical formulations

about character which
Tlie

Rainbov; and Women in Love make

manifest in art; rather, that the Study should be regarded

as
a

most helpful background for an understanding of Lawtli<

rence's unique ''people" in

-c

novels.

It will become
mod.i-

evident that the theories of the expository Study are

fied and reformulated in the imaginative art of the novels

Quite simply,
(1914)
is,

will argue that the

S tudy

of T h omas Hardy

at least in part,

an indirect commentary on the

,

characters of Sons and Lovers (1913)

and that an under-

standing of the essay is most helpful for an understanding of that novel.

Furthermore,

tlie

characters of The
L overs

Rainbo w seem to grow out of Sons and bearing evidence of Hardian ancestry.

while also

As "a potential

sequel to The Rainbow ," Women in Love repeats this pattern

of reworking old characters to develop new ones, and in

this novel the long-sought balance of fiction and meta-

physic is acliieved in
iless

new kind of character.

An aware

of this process of modification v/ill increase our

understanding of all of Lawrence's characters.

Before passing on to an examination of precisely what

it is

that Lawrence sees in Hardy's characters, and the

a

implicative principles which Lawrence affirms,

of another letter should be quoted.

good deal

This letter, which is

concerned with the same problems central to the Study of

Thomas Hardy
,

has become perhaps the most important letter

Lawrence ever wrote, offering, as it does, suggestive comments for understanding

v/hat

is

new in Lawrence's best

.

novels of new form:

The Rainbow and Women in Love

Writ-

ten one month before the Study was begiui,

the letter is a

defense of Lawrence's "attitude to my characters" in The

We dding Ring
,

the name for the intermediate novel between

the manuscripts of The Sisters and the finished versions

of The Rainbow and its sequel, Women
in

Love

The letter
5,

was written to Edward Garnett, and is dated June

The necessity for such lengthy quotation will,
1

1914.

trust,

become evident:
don't agree witli you about The Wedding ... I don't think the psychology is it is only that I have a different v/rong: attitude to my characters, and that necessitates a different attitude in you, which you When I read are not prepared to give. Marinetti -- 'the profound intuitions of life added one to the other, word by \;ord, according to their illogical conception, will give us the general lines of an intuitive physiology of matter' -- I see som.ething of v/hat I am don't care about the physiology I after. ... of matter --but somehow -- that which is physic -- non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element -which causes one to conceive a character in a certain mcral scheme and make him consistent. The certain moral scheme is what I object to.
I

Ring

fn Turgencv, and in Tolstoi, and in Dostoievsky, the moral scheme into which all the characters fit -- and it is nearly the same scheme -- is, whatever the extraordinariness of the characters tlieiiiselves dull, old, dead it is the inhuman will, call it pliysiology, or like Marinetti -- physiology of matter, that fascinates me. I don't so much care about what the woman feels -- in the ordinary usage of the word. Tliat presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about what the woman is -- what she
,

...

-- inhumanly, physiologically, materially according to the use of the word: but for me, what she is as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception. You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego -- of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states v.'hich it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single elem.ent of carbon. The ordinary novel ivould trace the history of the diamond -- buL And 1 say, 'Diamond, what! This is carbon.' my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme s carbon,). Again I say, don't look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of soiiie other rhythmic form, as when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray deJicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown

IS
--

:i

In

che postscript,
I

Lawrence adds:

"Please keep this let-

ter, because

'jant.

to write on futurism and it will help

me

'

The letter is quoted at such length because it sounds

all the chemes and presents all the problems to which this

thesis addresses itself:

the delineation of Lavsrrence's

concepus of character in joth prmciule ard practice.

There is

sense in which

i:iy

entire inquiry into Lawrence's

concept o character may be seen as an attempt to decipher

the meaning of this letter.

With the qualified exception

of Mark Schorer, no critic has yet elucidated the issues

voiced in this letter, which George

H.

Ford calls "freand which Harry T.

quently quoted but rarely explained,"

Moore names "Lawrence's manifesto."

II

The first two chapters of the Study are groundv/ork,

a

fanciful prologue to the study of Hardy.

The first chap-

ter is called "The Beginning of the Argument," and the

second is "Still Introductory."

the narrator of Tom Jones
,

In a tone reminiscent of
a

Lawrence ranges over

wide vari-

ety of subjects in an almost playful manner, talking of poppies and phoenixes and cave men, Dido and Clrrist, women's

suffrage, laws, war, and the poor.

The "structural skele-

ton," however, with which he will examine Hardy's novels

and inform his own, is already being built.
"The most

striking feature of Lawrence's Weltanschauung is its dualism," says H. M. Daleski in The Forked Flam e,
is
"^

and this

certainly the structural method by which the entire

Study proceeds from the outset.

"The systole of man's heartbeat," says Lawrence in the

opening paragraph of the Study, "his strenuous purpose,

unremitting," is self-preservation

--

"which has at length

become overblown and extravagant."

Opposing and contra,

dicting "this unappeased rage of self-'-f^^servation

"

how-

ever, "the diastole of the heaTthea\_y\j/s toward procrea-

tion and artistic creation (activities which, for Lawrence,

involve the same energies)

From this capital duality

,

outlined in the first two paragraphs of the Study

others follow:
ing V.

all

machine

v.

man, working v.

living, exist-

being, and female v. male.

,.

To dramatize such polarities

Lawrence use s symb ols

Thus the ant

and

pa,Xja]i.les

rather than systematic analysis.

and the grasshopper, the "ancient paleolithic man" and his

educated grandson, the poppy and the cabbage all serve to

present the dualistic conflict and to symbolize an abstraction.

The favorite system of metaplior, however,

is

that

of the life process of the flov/er.

People concerned solely

,

with self-preservation (as most people are)

live "without

ever burstijig the bud, the tight economical bud of caution

and thrift and self-preservation"
(401)
;

but "the final

aim [of life]

is the

flower

the magical spurt of

being

into fullness of self"

(403).*

=Cf.

Lawrence's "A Plan"

All

Collected Poems

p.

524):

I care about in a man is that unbroken spark in him v;here he is himself

undauntedly.

10

All the problems of Europe, Lawrence proposes, arise

from

tlic

failure of the people to assert their own unique

.

individuality of self (406)

"The earnest people of today

serve at the old, second-rate altar of self-preservation"

(404), and for these people,

immured in society, convention,

and work, only passing time ("the tick-tock of birth and

death")

is eternal.

For the phoenix, the poppy, and the The war, for

true individual, only the self is eternal.*

example (and here Lawrence is talking expressly about World

War

I)

is

being waged because man will embrace no other

way of manifesting his desire to break out of the prison of

security, caution, self-love, and self-preservation.
is afraid to risk a rebellion to live,
. .

Man
.

he "can only die.

And this

is

the only good that can result from the

'world disaster'" that we realize once m.ore that self-

preservation is not the final goal of life.

That

will free us, perhaps, from our crazed desire to live

"under the shelter of the social frame" (407)
.

The war

*Cf. Lawrence's remarks in the Preface to the American Edition of New Poems (1920): "Life, the ever-present, The perknows no finality, no finished crystallisation. fect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence the moment, and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the the quick of all change and haste and opposition: moment, the immediate present, the Now."
.
.

11

may give us, Lav^?rcnce hopes, "some new courage to let go

the securities, and to be"

(408).*

Most men foolishly view themselves as an economic object, as a "moneyed or unmoneyed thing."
But "neither

money or non-money matters supremely"; what matters is the

fire and color of the poppy, the light of the self creating the self into being.

This essential spark of the self

for self-preservation, and

is the alternative to the desire

by tb.is spark alone

.is

man truly able to live his life:

.

"like

poppy that has come to bud

v/hen

[a man]

has

traversed his known and come to the beach to meet the unknown, he must strip himself naked and plunge in
he dare"

...

if

(409).

This is, of course, the Kierkegaardian

'^Cf. "Manifesto," pt. VI: "To be, or not to be, is still the question. /This ache for being is the ultimate hunger," Collected Poems p. 26 5.
,

Alse cf. Lawrence's letter of January 17, 1913, to Ernest Collings, Letters ed. Huxley, p. 93: "We have forgotten ourselves. We are Ham.let without the Prince of Denmark. We cannot be. 'To be or not to be' -- it is the question with us now, by Jove. And nearly every Englishman says 'Not to be.' So he goes in for Humanitarianism and suchlike forms of not-being. The real way of living is to answer to one's wants. Not 'T want to light up with my intelligence as many things as possible' but 'For the living of my full flame -- I want that liberty, I want that woman, I want that pound of peaches, I want to go to sleep, I want to go to the pub and have a good time, I want to look a beastly swell today, I want Instead to kiss that girl, I want to insult that m.an. of that, all these wants, which are there whether-or-not are utterly ignored, and v/e talk about some sort of ideas, I'm like Carlyle, who, they say, wrote 50 volumes on the value of silence."
,
'

12

leap of faith into the existential abyss, and it is the

supreme moment by wliich all men are judged in the Laurentian metaphysic.
In this

rather unusual determination of the possibili-

ties for good in war, Lawrence hits the ethical and onto-

logical nerve of the twentieth century.

Be
,

la Tlie Courage to

Paul Tillich finds Socrates'

inability to define cour-

age in the Platonic dialogue Laches more important than most

of the apparently more successful definitions of courage

(including those of Plato himself, and of Aristotle).

"An

understanding of courage," says Tillich, "presupposes an understanding of man and of his world, its structures and
values.
can
shovv^
.
.

Courage can show us what being is, and being

1
-z

us what courage is."^

Tillich goes on to define

the courage to be in terms that both locate Lawrence in the

mainstream of contemporary theology and isolate what must

be considered Lawrence's ethical imperative:
"Tlie

courage

to be is the etliical act in whicli man affirms his own being

in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict
v;ith Ills

essential self-affirmation."

Despite Lawrence's later reading of the Greek and Roman

philosophers (at the behest of Bertrand Russell)

neither in

the St udy nor in any of the later works does he affirm the

Stoic concepts of courage or being, which Tillich formulates

as

"the courage to affirm one's own reasonable nature over

. . .

against what is accidental in us

the courage to

13

affirm our own rational nature."

in "what is accidental

Indeed, it is precisely

in us" tliat Lawrence glories, with

a

nuch the same zeal as Gerard Manley Hopkins in

poem like

"Pied Beauty," in which the poet praises God for

All things counter, original spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (v;ho knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.
In

the context of Tillich's discussion of the contrast in

the valuation of the individual in the ancient and modern

attitudes, Lawrence's position would seem to be that of

modern extremist:

"While the ancient world valued the ina

dividual not as an individual but as

representative of

something universal, e.g.,

virtue, the rebirth of antiqa

uity saw in the individual as an individual

unique expres-

sion of the universe, incomparable, irreplaceable, and of

infinite significance."

And yet Lawrence does not fit into the tradition of

modern Western philosophy, with respect to the ontology of

courage, as Tillich defines it. Both Spinoza and Nietzsche,

regarded by Tillich as the central philosophers of being in

our culture,
1

agree that the central activity of life is

self-affirmation, but neither distinguishes between the

self-affirming and self-preserving impulses or activities,

a

distinction central to the Laurentian dualism.

Indeed,

the central problems of character and A^alue in Lawrence

build upon the conflict between the self -preservin;^ and the

self-fulfilling forces, betv;een the

;jgo

and the self.

14

III

This primary duality of self-prese rvation vs

SQ lf

:^

fulfillment having been constructed, Lawrence begins the

third chapter of the Study by asserting what must have been
his own basic motivation for writing a book "about Hardy's

people".

"One thing about them," he says, "is that none of

the heroes and heroines care very much for money, or immedi-

ate self-preservation, and all of them are struggling hard

to come into being.".

This struggle consists primarily in

.

"the struggle into love and the struggle with love.

The via media to being

...

is

love, and love alone"

(410).

The struggle of love is the sole artistic concern:

Having achieved and accomplished love, then He has the man passes into the unknown. Of anybecome himself, his tale is told. thing that is complete there is no more tale The tale- is about becoming complete, to tell. or about the failure to become complete (410)
.

The conflict in Hardy's novels, then, stems from the con-

frontation of "unreasonable" and explosive characters (who

"are always bursting suddenly out of bud and taking a v/ild

flight into flower")

schem.e
.

with "the great self-preservation

formulated in the state, in the whole
Hardy's characters are
,

v;hich is

modelling of the community" (411).

unpredictable and unusual because they are all trying to be

trying to break "out of
a

tight convention

...

to live out

side in the precarious open."

But "from such an outburst

the tragedy usually develops," because none of the heroes

or heroines can free themself

entirely from the community

15

which imprisons "his natural,

his own unique self.

individual desire" to fulfill

This conflict between the scheme of

self-preservation and the desire for self-fulfillment,

says Lawrence, "is the one theme of the I'/essex novels"
(412).

Lawrence records his quite personalized reaction to the

first five novels
(

Desperate Remedies
,

Under the Greenwood

,

Tree

A Pair of Blue Eyes

Far from the Madding Crowd

and

The Hand of Othelberta ) witli a short paragraph about each.

About

The Return of the Native

however, Lavs^rence says "this

(413)
.

is the first tragic and important novel"

In this

novel, all the characters bent firmly on self-realization

(Eustacia, Clym's mother) are destroyed by social convention.
Clym,
his
ety.
wlio

is "not able

to undertake his ovm soul," denies

ov;n

individual drives and identifies himself v/ith sociHe is an eternal as-

IVildeve "had no positive being.

sumption" (414)
The "real sense of tragedy," however, comes from Egdon Heath.
The "real spirits of the Heath," says Ln'A'rence, are

Eustacia, Clym's mother, and V/ildeve:

"the natives have

The

little or nothing in common with the place" (415).

Heath is the center and progenitor of "instinctive life,"

".
.
.

organic as the body of a beast."

a

Egdon Heath is not

a

important to Lav/rence as

particular place, but as

real

and symbolic force working in the novel, a force which in-

forms the will to self-fulfillment and self-realization and

v/hich is

at its very roots opposed to any scheme of societal

16

conventions.

Furthermore, the Heath is eternal, as soci-

eties and individuals are not:

Out of the body of this crude earth are born Eustacia, Wildeve, Mistress Yeobright, They are one Clym, and all the others. year's accidental crop.

Here is the deep, black source from whence all these little contents of lives are drawn. And the contents of the small lives are There is savage satisspilled and washed. faction in it: for so much more remains to come, such a black, powerful fecundity is working there that what does it matter? (415). This year's accidental crop of characters is unable to fulfill its nature. the real thing:

Eustacia mistakes her image of Paris for

"But Paris real
v/as

not Eustacia'

imagined

Paris.

Where was her imagined Paris, the place where her

powerful nature could come to blossom?

Beside some strongClym, who could

passioned, unconfined man, her mate" (416).

have been this mate, is unable to burst into his real self, and must identify himself with the societal system.
is

Clym

"impotent to be"; he is unable to produce anything "origi-

nal in being or in act, and certainly no original thought"

(417).

Lawrence quotes Hardy's description of the embattled

Clym, a description which images Clym's imprisoned self or

being:

"As is usual with bright natures, the deity that

lies ignominiously chained within an ephemeral human carcass

shone out of him like

ray."
tlie

Lawrence sees the mind as the

real prison, guarded by

will, confining the blood,

"which rose dark and potent out of Egdon."

Clym has been

17

educated above his roots in Egdon Heath.

Pie

has lost his

connection with the elemental forces of life and, in the

course of the novel, allows himself to be swallowed up by
a

system of ideas and conventions which is itself only an

"He had identified himself

accidental crop of the Heath:

with the system, and he could not extricate himself" (418).

Clym is foolish and blind because he does not recognize
Egdon, "the primal impulsive body,
,

the great reality";

he is a failure because he does not recognize and cannot

come to terms v/ith "the primal impulses that rise in him,"

and that arise from the Heath itself.

Lawrence's central focus, in this novel, then, is Egdon Heath and the characters who grow out of the Heath.
Law-

rence seems to be most intrigued by Hardy's system of nature

and his manipulation of the lives within that system:
This is a constant revelation in Hardy's novels: that there exists a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the Against the backpeople who move upon it. ground of dark, passionate Egdon, of the leafy, sappy passion and sentiment of the woodlands, of the unfathomed stars, is drawn The R eturn of the lesser scheme of lives: or Tv.o on a the Native, The V.'oodlandcrs To\ver D'pon the vast, incomprehensible patteriT^of some primal morality greater than ever the human mind can grasp, is drawn the little, pathetic pattern of man's moral life and struggle, pathetic, almost ridiculous. The little fold of law and order, the little walled city within which man has to defend himself from the waste enormity of nature, becomes always too small, and the pioneers venturing out with the code of the \sfalled city upon them, die in the bonds of that code, free and yet unfree, preaching the walled city and looking to the waste.
,
.

18

This is the wonder of Hardy's novels, and The vast, unexplored gives them their beauty. morality of life itself, what we call the immorality of nature, surrounds us in its eternal incomprehensibility, and in its midst goes on the little human morality play (419).

John Holloway, in The Victorian Sage

would seem to agree

with Lawrence's remarks on the primal forces of nature in

Hardy's world:
'Nature' for Flardy is scarcely picturesque, clearly not static, and above all not a backIt is the working and changing system cloth. of the whole world -- Nature in the older sense of Chaucer or Spenser or Pope (for they had one sense in common), though with a detailed knowledge of its operations which none Nor of these displayed or perhaps possessed. is it a backcloth against v\:hich to see human activity; it is a system which includes that activity, profoundly modifies it, and ultimately controls it. -8 The emphasis of Lawrence's analysis, however, rests squarely
on the fact that in Hardy's novels the great forces of na-

ture come to a head in their human manifestation, and the

human struggle to "come into being" consists in man's attempt to "learn to be at one, in his mind and will, with the

primal impulses that rise in him" (418).

In this sense,

the

implications of "physiology" in Lawrence's letter to Garnett

become clearer.
In "The Marble and the Statue," Mark
.

Kinkead-Weekes finds that "through studying

people Lawrence had found
a

Hardy's

language in vmich to conceive

the im.personal forces he saw operating within and between

human beings; involving

new clarification of what the

[

novel he had been trying to write

The Sisters

was really

19

about; and the discovery of a 'structural srceleton' on

which, to re- found it in a new dimension."
It

19

is the

quality of this confrontation of the imper-

sonal forces of unfathomed nature with "a smaller system

of morality
(419)
. .
.

formulated by the human consciousness,"

according to Lawrence, that Hardy shares with the

great writers, such as Shakespeare, Sophocles, or Tolstoi.

The difference in these four writers, he says, is that in

Sophocles and Sliakespeare the incomprehensible morality of

nature is transgressed and returns active punishment; but
in Hardy and Tolstoi,
is

the lesser system of human morality

transgressed and in turn punishes the protagonist.

The

"real tragedy" is that the heroes and heroines of Hardy and

Tolstoi "are unfaithful to the greater unwritten morality"

(420); that is, they fail to reconcile the primary impulses

within them to their own particular human situation.*

Lawrence believes, is "the weakness of modern tragedy":

This,
its

'^'Cf. Lawrence's remarks on Anna Karenina in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essa ys" (]92 57"i
,

Nobody in the world is anything but delighted when Yronsky gets Anna Karenina. Then what about the sin? Why, when you look at it, all the tragedy comes from Vronsky's and Anna's The monster was social, not fear of society They couldn't live in the phallic at ail. pride of their sincere passion, and spit in Mother Grundy's eye. And that, that cowardice, was the real "sin." The novel makes it obvious, and knocks all old Leo's teeth out.
.

20

heroes war v:ith (and lose to) Society, not with God.

Trans-

gression against the conventions of society leads inevitably

to destruction,

"as though the social code worked our ir-

revocable fate."
In such reduction may perhaps be seen the central

trend

of tradition in the nineteentli-century novel.

From the con-

ventions of Highbury in Jane Austen's Emma, to George Eliot's

Middlemarcli and Hardy's Jude
,

the characters of novels are

contained, defined, and judged by societal forms.

Personal

destiny i^ social destiny, as George Eliot implies in Felix

Holt
:

"There is no private life which has not been detera

mined by

wider public life." 20

,

In such novels,

as

Arnold

Kettle says of Middlemarch

"the background has become the

subject.""

21

The mechanistic, deterministic pattern of life

which Eliot portrays in Middlemarch stems from the town itself, which is represented as a static, limiting,

control-

ling order.

The ideal of conduct in such an order is the and transcendence of that value is tantamount

status quo

to transgression.

IV
In a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell,

dated January 27,

1915, Lawrence writes,

"The way to express the abstract-

whole is to reduce the object to a unit, a term, and then

out of these units and terms to make a v;hole statement."""
It
7 7

is

apparent that after (or during) the third chapter of

,

the Study

Lawrence became dissatisfied with his first

21

duality of self-preservation
as
a

v,

self -fulfillment

at least

s^^

vehicle for talking about character.

For it is at this
'

point that the initial duality is dropped and, after a chapter attacking the Carlylean concept of work fas he does so

often in the novels, notably The Rainbow

IVomo n
,

in Love

Aaron's Rod
a

and Lady Chatterley's Lover )

Lawrence proposes
"The

second duality by which to evaluate Hardy's heroes:

--

distinct individuality" v. "the matrix"

the individual
.

against the bourgeois values of social convention (434)

This duality, it is obvious, is
the first,
a

particular extension of

issuing from the particular consideration of

v.

Hardy's characters in terms of self-preservation

self-

fulfillment in the third chapter.

Having established the

predominance of the self -preserving impulse in society, as

well as defining his view of true individuality as self-

fulfillment,

Lav\:rence

simply changes the terms of his dual-

ity in order to approach his subjects from another direction:

Looking over the Hardy novels, it is interesting to see which of the heroes one would call a distinct individuality, more or less achieved, which an unaccomplished potential individuality, and which an impure unindividualized life embedded in the matrix, either achieving its own lower degree of distinction, or not achieving it (434).
It

becomes readily apparent that this new approach is

also primarily centered around Hardy's heroes and heroines

and, more- specif ically, with what Lawrence calls Hardy's
"

predilection d'artist e for the aristocrat" (435).

a

Desmond

Hawkins has since posited

tradition of "a nervous, highly-

22

individualized sensibility in retreat from the social

scene," of which "Hardy is the greatest modern example,
and D.
II.

Lav/rence his most brilliant disciple --

very

John of Patmos."^^

Such sensibilities are described by

Lawrence in the third chapter as having "a real, vital,

potential self" (410) and as being "passionate, individual,

willful" (411).

The aristocrat is one who has tradition-

ally had the social and economic freedom "where he could

afford to be, to be himself, to create himself, to live as

himself" (436).
Richard
D.

Lawrence's special use of the term, as

a

Beards puts it, "applies to

quality of behav24

ior rather than a particular social status;"

and

would

prefer to say

quality of being

rather than behavior,

It
is

identifies the aristocrat for Lawrence.

is,

in what Tess

rather than what she does, that makes her an aristocrat

She is of an old line, and has the aristocratic quality of respect for the other She does not see the other person being. as an extension of herself, existing in a universe of which she is the center and She knows that other people are pivot. Therein she is an aristocrat. outside her. She respects utterly the other's right to She is herself always (483). be.

This predilection for the aristocratic freedoms and

temperament is not only the obsession of Hardy (and Lawrence as well)

;

"it is rooted deeply in every imaginative

human being."

"The glory of mankind," Lawrence goes on,

"has been to produce lives, to produce vivid, independent.

23

individual men, not buildings or engineei-ing works or even

art, not even the public good.

The glory of mankind is

not in a host of secure, comfortable, law-abiding citizens,

but in a few more fine, clear lives, beings, individual,

distinct, detached, single as may be from the public."

Such heroes, says Lawrence, "the artist of all time has

chosen"

(4

36)

" .

"Why, then," he asks, "must the aristocrat always be

condemned to death,

-in

Hardy?"

Lawrence posits two reasons:

first, there is "a germ of death" in the more distinct

individuality of the hero; and second, "the artist himself [Mardy] has a bourgeois taint," which revenges itself on the aristocrat (436)
.

Hardy makes his exceptional

people villains "in steadily weakening degree" in the course

of his novels:

"Hardy,

like Tolstoi, is forced in the issue

always to stand with the community in condemnation of the

aristocrat" (459).
is

In

the earlier novels,

the individual

the villain and the community triumphs over him; but even
(

in the later novels

Return of the Native

Mayor of Caster -

bri dge, Tess and Jude ) Hardy "must select his individual

with

definite weakness,

certain coldness of temper, in-

elastic, a certain inevitable and inconquerable adhesion to

tlie

community."

Lawrence accuses Hardy of

"moral antago-

nism" tov/ard the character who stands outside the societal

pale:

whether the character is good (Jude) or bad (Manston)

he is obliged to be obliterated by the society wliich produced

24

him, and for this kind of predilection d'artiste Lawrence says that Hardy "is something
o
C

an Angel Clare"

(489).

The conclusions which Lawrence draws from this "new"

approach to Hardy's people are the same as those drawn in

the third chapter:

the individual is defeated by society

and is unable to create and fulfill his own being.

Further-

more, the fault is partly his own in that he cannot break

the last ties or obligations to that which destroys him, the community itself.
He dies primarily by his "own lack
.

of strength to bear the isolation and the exposure" (411)

Again,

Lawrence finds such tragedy flawed:

There is a lack of sternness, there is a hesitating betwixt life and public opinion, which diminishes the Wessex novels from the It is not that rank of pure tragedy. ... vital life-forces are set in conflict with It is, in Wessex, that each other. ... the individual succumbs to what is in its shallowest, public opinion, in its deepest, the human compact by which we live together, to form a community (440)
.

Lawrence's quarrel is not with Hardy or Tolstoi p er se

nor even with "modern tragedy," but with the entire tragic
mode.
His strictly Pelagian world-view denies the possi-

bility of fate or destiny, which are essential to tragedy.

Man, for Lawrence, is both

radically innocent and capable

of working out his own salvation; he is "utterly self-

responsible. "^^

Thus man is ultimately responsible for

everything that happens to him.

All good and evil "lies

(406). As

in the heart of man and not in the conditions"

Lawrence says in

short poem, not society but "the rear of

25

society is

tlie

root of all evil."

? 7

Thus "Tess allowed

herself to be condemned, and asked for punishment from

Angel Clare
.

[because] she sided with the community's

condemnation of her" (440)

As we have seen, the tragic protagonist must above all

be heroic; but if he is truly heroic,

Lav;rence would argue,

it

there would be no tragedy.

(The hero,

should be remem-

bered, is the radically innocent man capable of creating

his own destiny.)

Lawrence explains
a

tliis

most clearly, per

haps, in his introduction to

book by Giovanni Verga:

I think it is a final criticism against Madame Bovary that people such as Emma Bovary and her husband Charles simply are too insignificant to carry the full weight of Gustavo Flaubert's sense of tragedy. Emma and Charles Bovary are a couple of Gustavo Flaubert is not a little people.. But, because he is a reallittle person. ist and does not believe in "heroes," Flaubert insists on pouring his own deep and bitter tragic consciousness into the little skins of the country doctor and The result is a his uneasy wife. And to get over the misfit, you misfit. have to let in all sorts of seams of pity. Seams of pity, which won't be hidden.
.

The realistic-democratic age has dodged the dilemma of having no heroes by having every This is reached by what man his own hero. we call subjective intensity, and in this subjectively-intense every-man-his -own hero business the Russians have carried us to The merest scrub of the greatest lengths. a pick-pocket is so phenomenally av/are of his own soul, that we are made to bow down before the imaginary coruscations that go on inside him.
.
. .

Of course your soul will coruscate, if That's why the Russians you think it does. No matter how m.uch of a are so popular. shabby animal you may be, you can learn

26

from Dostoievsky and Chekhov, etc., how

to have the most tender, unique, coruscating soul on earth. And so you may be Which most vastly important to yourself. The hero is the private aim of all men. had it openlv. The commonplace person has it inside himself (226,228-229).

Lawrence's disdain of the "imaginary coruscations" of the

soul leads him to scorn the classical accompanists of the

tragic hero and the tragic mode;

fear and pity.

The

evocation of such emotions, he feels, leads inexorably to

an unseemly self -conscious self-pity, as he points out in

his poem "Tragedy":

Tragedy seems to be a loud noise Louder than is seemly. Tragedy looks to me like man In love with his own defeat. Which is only a sloppy v/ay of being in love with yourself.
can't very much care about the v^/oes and tragedies Of Lear and Macbeth and Hamlet and Timon. 2 Tliey cared so excessively themselves
I
.

As David Gordon puts it, "he felt that tragedy tended at

once to magnify spuriously by creating pity for the wronged

good and to depress by assuming the inevitability of defeat.

It

tended,

that is,

toward sentimentality, and it assumed

29

that earthly life could not be complete and nontragic."

V
Three succeeding chapters (the sixth, seventh and
eighth) prepare for the third and final segment of Lawrence's

analysis of Hardy.

Again, Lawrence changes the terms of

his argument, creating a new conceptual model with which

27

to examine "Hardy's people."

David Gordon explains this

most clearly:
Now Lawrence shifts his approach. The terms are no longer social m.orality versus natural morality but the polar forces of natural morality itself: Love versus Law, Male versus Female, Spirit versus Flesh, With this new scheme Christ versus Jehovah. the error of Hardy's art -- and it is only Hardy's best art the critic is now concerned with -- can be formulated in a new way. 20
In the three

intermediate chapters, which are an interpre-

tation of the whole of Western art and culture, Lawrence

constructs

dialectic through which he can at once examine

for. his

Hardy's best novels and formulate new standards

own.

The earlier dualities by which Lawrence examined the self

in relation to its community are replaced by a dialectic

which focuses on the self in relation to itself and to other

individuals.
This movement of the Study is the key to Law-

rence's changing critical method, though it has been long

unrecognized.

In The Forked Flame

a

for instance, H. M.

Daleski argues for

continuing dualism in which there is

neither resolution nor transcendence of the dual polarities.

^^

Mark Kinkead-Weekes

on the other hand, character-

izes Lawrence's structural skeleton in the Study as "not

dualistic but implicitly dialectic, since it always implies

a

state beyond every successive clash of thesis and anti"2''

thesis.

The problem here, of course, is that Daleski

's

argument is true for the first two Laurentian dualities

(self-fulfillment v. self-preservation, and "the distinct

28

individuality, or hero, v. the bourgeois values of social

convention")
,

but it does not take into account the essen(Law v.

tial difference in the third set of opposed terms

Love, male principle v.

female principle, flesh v. mind,

etc.)) whicli is aimed at producing a concept of the unity

of being.

This third set of opposed values, tlien, is

in wliich synthesis
is_

dia-

lectic

--

possible.

In the first and

second sets of polarities, of course, no synthesis was possible.

Daleski's term "duality" accounts for these first

two sets, but fails to account for dialectical nature of the

third set.

Kinkead-Weekes ,on the other hand, gives us

satisfactory account of the dialectical framework of

final chapters of the Study
,

tlie

but he does not recognize the

Kinkead-

purely dualistic nature of the first five chapters.

'Veekes
'

description, for example, cannot account for the ir-

resoluble conflict (hence dualistic) which Lawrence sees at

the center of the modern tragic form.
Vvith

this distinction

betv/een duality and dialectic in mind, both the Study and

the Laurentlan metaphysic become more easily accessible.

The sixth, seventh and eighth chapters of the Study

attero.pt

to define the terms of this new dialectic,

.

Law and

Love (or Female and Male)

Though it is neither necessary

nor convenient to my argument to examine these chapters in

detail, H. M. Daleski has constructed a table "abstracting

the qualities" of this polarity.
He includes reference to

29

the page numbers in the Phoenix where discussion of the

particular qualities may be found:

'
KtaaiiicM#airb(7^

Male

Female

Movement Change
Activity-

Time

Will-to-Motion Registers Relationships Refusal of Sensation Multiplicity and Diversity Knowledge

Love Spirit God the Son Service of Some Idea Doing Self- Subordination

Stability Immutability Permanence Eternality^ Will-to-Inertia Occupied in Self-Feeling Submission to Sensation Oneness^
,

Peeling'^

Utterance Abstraction Public Good Community Mental Clarity Consciousness Spirit Mind Consciousnes
Knov/ledge

Law Flesh God the Father^ Full Life in the Body Being^ Self -Establishments Gratification in the Senses'

Enjoyment through the Senses 1

.

Sensation^
Instinct*^

Soul Senses Feelin^s^

Nature"'

Condition of Knowledge Brain Stalk

^Phoenix, p.
^^irrdTT^p.
grbjLG. JIbid:.

Condition of Being Body^ Root

^

46
43:

455.
483

Ibid flMIf.

,
,

i TFid"

p. p.

498. 510.

iToTn;.

p. p. p. p.

451 481 487 509

Lav.'

(Female)
(Male)

is

seen as the center of the Hebraic tradition;

tlie

Love

identifies

Christian tradition:

In the Father \'je are one flesh, in Christ we are crucified, and rise again, and are One

30

It is the difference with Him in Spirit. Each man shall live between Law and Love. according to the Law, which changeth not, Each man shall live says the old religion. according to Love, which shall save us from death and from the Law, says the new religion (465).

For each man there is the bride, for each woman the bridegroom, for all, the Mystic Marriage (467)
.

In the rest of the Study

then, Lawrence is attempting to

schematize the art of the V/estern world in terms of his

theory of Occidental history and religion.
He examines the

painting of Durer, Botticelli, Corrcggio, Raphael, Michelangelo

,

Rembrandt and Turner, as well as the "metaphysic" of

Aeschylus, Euripides, Shelley, Swinburne, Spinoza and Tolstoi.

The "Mystic Marriage" of Love and Law, of the Male

and Female principles, becomes the compelling goal of art

(as

ei^idenced in the work of Aeschylus and Turner)

but the

essential content of art is conflict.

Aeschylus' art is

more satisfying than that of Euripides because the former

portrays an equal, balanced conflict, where the latter has

Love "unequally matched" with Law:
If Aeschylus has a metaphysic to his art, this metaphysic is that Love and Law are Two, eternally in conflict, and eternally being reconciled (477)
.

This dialectic is the basis of Lawrence's tlieory of form:

Artistic form is a revelation of the two principles of Love and the Law in a state pure moof conflict and yet reconciled: tion struggling against and yet reconciled active force meeting and with the Spirit: overccm.ing and yet not overcoming inertia. It is the conjunction of the tv/o which And since the two must alv/ays makes form.

31

meet under fresh conditions, form must always be different. Each work of art has its own form, which has no relation to any other form (477)
.

The form of Hardy's art errs on the side of Euripides

(and Tolstoi):
'"Tliere is no reconciliation between Love

and the Law,'

says Hardy.

'The spirit of Love must always

succumb before the blind, stupid; but overwhelming power of

the Law'"
(480).

Lawrence sees in Hardy an unsympathetic

portrayal of the Female principles (flesh, primeval Law)

as

either too strong (Jude accepting Arabella) or too weak

,

(Angel Clare rejecting Tess)

but always disruptive.

La\\:

The
alv/ays

conflict itself, however, is inevitably unequal;

conquers Love.

Lawrence attributes this unequal conflict

in the novels to "the weak yet obstinate theory of being"

in the author, but Lawrence does not ultimately see either

the novels nor Hardy as failures.

Hardy's metaphysic, to
"his sensuous

be sure, is "botched," but as an artist,

understanding is

deeper than that, perhaps, of any

.

other English novelist" (480) often makes about Hardy:

This is a point Lawrence

though the book is wrong in its

intellectual conception, it is ultimately right as art.

Of Tess
,

for example, he says.

And so Hardy really states his case, which is not his consciously stated metaphysic, by any means, but a statement how man has gone wrong and brought death on himself: how man has violated the Law, l^oiv he has supererogated himself, gone so far in his male conceit as to supersede the Creator, Indeed, the and win death as a reward. works of supererogation of our male assiduity helps us to a better salvation (488)

32

The art of even

tlie

greatest artists, however, "leaves the

"Humanity-

soul unsatisfied" if the mctaphysic is infirm.

does not continue for long to accept the conclusions" of

either the artist of the Law (Aeschylus, Dante, Plato,

Raphael) or the artist of Love (Shakespeare, Shelley, Words-

worth, Goethe, Hardy).

Indeed,

"nov\'

the aim of man remains

to recognize and seek out the Holy Spirit,

tlie

the Reconciler,

Originator, He who drives the twin principles of Law and

of Love across the ages" (514).

Neither Hardy nor anyone

else has made the art which must be the art of the future:

"there shall be the art which knows the struggle between the
two conflicting laws, and knows the final reconciliation,

where both are equal, two -in-one, complete.

This is the

supreme art, which yet remains to be done" (515-516).

This consummation is a goal at once artistic, religious
and psychological.!^ The Eucharist is "the ritual representing the Consummation" (467); and the "deepest human desire
[is]

for consummation"

(468).

The goal of this desire is

As Kinkead-Weekes

the "iMystic Marriage" of Law and Love.

points out, "what we watch is Lawrence in the act of trying

to formulate a 'theoretical'

basis for his whole intuitive

view of marriage

...

way of looking at every personality

and all relationships as the outcome of conflict between two

radically opposed forces, impersonal, and universal."

Both forces, it should be noted, are seen as positive ways
o being, but they must be brought together to express the

33

vvfhole

"Truth":

"What ue call the Truth is, in actual ex-

perience, that momentary state when in living the union between the male and the female is consummated.
This consum-

mation may be also physical, between the male body and the
female body.
But it may be only spiritual, between the male
.

and female spirit" (460)

is

The force of the female

(or Law)

toward total identification with the "primal impulses"

of nature, tow'ard oneness with all flesh and all things.

The force of the male (Love)
"is to move into ever more

complete individuation.""^
The conflict ivhich ensues from these opposites is eternal,'* but

"the two must be for ever reconciled"

(475).

And,

as H.

M.

Daleski argues, "the contending forces must retain

"The

their separate identities" even in reconciliation.

neivT

whole," he goes on, "which

is

created by establishing
a

relation between the opposites is not

fusing of the two

The

into one but a com.plementing of the one by the other."

consummation paradoxically reveals in the clearest light the

very identities which it joins:

*Cf. Lawrence's introduction to "Reptiles" in Birds, Beasts and Flow^ers

:

"Homer was wrong in saying, MVould that strife might pass away from among Gods and men! He did not see that lie was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things ivould pass away" -- for in the tension of opposites all things have their being ( Collected Poems p, 348).
'

34

In the act of love, that which is mixed in me becomes pure, that which is female in me is given to the female, that whicli is male in her draws into me, I am complete, T am pure male, she is pure female; we rejoice in contact perfect and naked and clear, singled out onto ourselves, and given the surpassing freedom. For No longer we see through a glass, darkly. she is she, and I am I, and, clasped together with her, I know how perfectly she is not me, how perfectly I am not her, how utterly we are two, the light and the darkness, and how infinitely and eternally not-to-be-comprehended by either of us is the surpassing One we make. Yet of tliis One, this incomprehensible, we have an inkling that satisfies us (468). ^7

It

is

clear that the form of the Study

as
,

v.-ell

as

the

theoretical form of art posited in the Study

marriage.'
nial

is

that of

In this marriage

there are two polar forces of

strength which are always in conflict and forever

In

being reconciled.

reconciliation there is "surpassing

tliere

freedom," but there is never stasis;

and conflict and reconciliation:

is

always

groA-/th

"active force meeting and

overcoming and yet not overcoming inertia" (477).

Final

reconciliation
m.ay

is

not yet possible although, in time, it

"No man can as yet find perfect consum.ma-

be attained:

tion of marriage between himself and the Bride, be the bride

either Woman or an Idea, but he can approximate to it, and

every generation can get
a

little nearer" (515).

The forces of art and the forces of character are im-

personal ones, ever in

process

of.

conflict and reconcilia-

tion, constantly showing up in different forms

(changing

35

their names and their appearances}

ing.

but essentially unchang-

The task o the artist is to portray the interaction

of these forces, to give them utterance:

"When the two are

acting together, then Life is produced, then Life, or Utterance

,

Something is created

'

And nothing is or can be

created save by combined effort of the two principles. Law

and Love" (513)

This, then, was the Laurentian metaphysic in 1914.

Let us return to our first quotation from the Study
:

Because a novel is a microcosm, and because man in viewing the universe must view it in the light of a theory, therefore every novel must have the background or the structural skeleton of some theory of being, some metaphysic (479).
,

This theory of being, which is unfolded in the Study, is an

elaboration on the "allotropic states of the ego" about which

Lawrence wrote to Garnett.
Three months after completing
/'

the Study, Lawrence had completely revised The Sisters and

had divided it into at least

little doubt of the

tivo

volumes.

38

There can be

im.per4;^ance

of the Study for the final

version of The Rainbo\Vs,_. nor of its importance for Lawrence's radically new concept of character.

With the formu-

lation and elaboration of this concept, Lawrence was creating

*Cf.

Part II of Lawrence's poem "Wedlock"

2 4 7)

Collected

Poems

p.

And think, there will something come forth from us. We two, folded so small together, T?iere will something come forth from us. Children, acts, utterance. Perhaps only happiness.

36

new kind of reality for his characters.

It

is

the kind

of reality Freud and Jung were also creating, althougli Law-

rence knew next to nothing about them.

vievsT

With this radical

of self Lawrence was to shape the faltering project of

into The Rainbow and Women in Love within three

T he Sisters

40 years. ^"

NOTES

CHAPTER

International Book Reviei\f the essay also appears in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence ed. Edv^ard D. McDonald~CNew York: Viking Press, 1936), pp. 51720 (hereafter cited as Phoenix)
;

Phoenix p. 479. Most critics underline the Study of Thomas Hardy for the reader's convenience.
,

T he Collected Letters o f D. H. Lawrence ed. Harry T. Moore ^London: Heinemann, WGl) f, 287 Also The Letters of D. H. Lawrence ed. Aldous Huxley (London: Heinemann, 1932), p. 205.
,

Letters

ed.

Moore,

I,

290;

also. Letters

ed.

Huxley,

p.

208.
S.

Foster Damon, Amy Lowell.

,

A Chronicle

(Boston:

n.p.

1935)

p.
,

279.
p.

P hoenix
7

48 5.

George H. Ford, Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lav/rence (New York: Floit Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 21, 32.
,

Letters ed. Moore, Hux 1 ey, pp. 19 8-99.

,

I,

81-82; also Letters

ed.

^Ford, p. 140.

Harry T. Moore, The Int e lligent Heart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954) p. 163.
,

H. M. Daleski, The Forked Flame (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1965) p. TT.
, ,

Nu.mbers parenthetically enclosed in Phoenix, p. 398. text refer to previously cited edition of Phoenix
.

12

''^Paul Tillich, The C ourage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. T7

37

38

As we shall later see, Lawrence's disIbid., p. 3. tinction between self-fulfillment and self-preservation is important here.

^^Ibid., p.
^^^Ibid.
,

13. 19.

p.

Sartre, on the other hand, would seem to accept the see Part One, Chapter 2 of Being and Laurentian duality: Nothingness (New York: U'ashington Square Press, 1966)
.

1953)

^^.Tohn Holloway, pp. 251-52.

,

The Victorian Sage

(London: MacMillan,

"The Marble and the Statue," """^Mark Kinkcad-Weekes Imagin ed World s ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London: Metiiuen and Co. 1968), p. 380.
,
,

(London: ^^George Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical^ ~~ Books Ltd., 1965), p. S^.
^"^

Panther

rev.

ed.

Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel p. 172. (New York: Harper and Row, 1968 J
,

^^

Letters

ed.

Huxley, p. 216.

^^Desmond Hawkins, Thomas Hardy (London: Arthur Barker

Ltd.
,

1950)

pp.

30-31.

^^Richard D. Beards, "D. H. Lawrence and the Study of Thom as Hardy ," The D. H. Lawrence Review 2 (Fall 1969),
,

mr.
"^Cf. Eric Bentley, A Century of Hero Worship (New York; Lippincott, 1944), pp. 2 31-53, in which Lawrence's concept of the hero and his use of the hero in his own novels is discussed.
^^ David J. Gordon, D. H. La wrence as a Literary Critic 1966) p. 76. (New Haven: Yale University Press
,

ed. with intro. ^'^The Compl ete Poems of D. H. Lawrence by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, 2 vols. (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 516.
,

^^Ibid.

p.

508.

Gordon, p. 79.
^^Ibid.
,

p.

86.

39

3lDaleski, p. 21.

^^Kinkead-Weekes, pp. 382-83.

23Daleski,
p.

30.

^^Kinkead-Weekes, p. 383.
35ibid.
,

p.

382.
p.

"^^Daleski,

21

^^Cf.
I

Lawrence's long poem, "Manifesto," pt. VTI

want her to touch me at last, ah on the root and quick of my darkness and perish on me as I have perished on her.
Then, v;e shall be two and distinct, we shall have each our separate being. And that will be pure existence, real liberty. Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved, unextricated one from the other.

When she is slain against me, and lies in a heap like one outside the house, When she passes away as I have passed away, being pressed up against the other then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with Iier, distinct, single as if I shall be cleared, burnished in silver, having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere, one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique, and she is also pure isolated, complete, two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction.
,

Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect.

^^See

Letters
296,

ed.

Huxley, p.

212;

and Letters

ed.

Moore,

I,

306.
,

^^ The p.

Intelligent Heart

p.

189; also cf.

Daleski,

19.

^^See The Int elligent Heart, p. 163, for Moore's discussion of this crucial cTTange of direction in Lawrence's
life and art.

CHAPTER
HARDY INTO LAWRENCE:

II

CHANGING THE MOLD

The descent beckons iis the ascent beckoned

Memory is
of accor.iplishmcnt a sort of renewal
an initiatioji,

kind

even since the spaces it opens are new

places

inhabited by hordes heretofore unrealized. W. C. Williams, Patterson

My knov.n self V'/ill never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
Gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.
the courage to let them I must have come and go.

Studies in H. La^vrence Classic American Literature

D.
,

Lawrence's views of character and being had not always

been as clear as they became in the Study
.

It has

long

been obvious to his critics that Lawrence leans heavily, in

the earlier novels

(i.e., The White Peacock

[1911]

The

Trespasser [1912], and Sons and Lovers [1913]), on his predecessors in The novel, and in particular, on Thomas Hardy.
Precise critical discussion of this "literary ancestry" is

usually limited, however, to The W^ite Peacock

40

or to

41

cursory remarks about style, tone, or landscape.

Raney

Stanford's article, entitled "Tliomas Hardy and Lawrence's

The White Peacock ," for example, finds in the heroine of
a

that novel, Lottie Beardsall,

close resemblance to Sue

,

Bridehead of Hardy's Jude the Obscure

have affirmed this connection.
It seems
2

and other critics

profitable, however, to press this connection

further,

and to ask why Lawrence chose to u'rite "a little

book about Hardy's people" so late in his career (JuneNovember, 1914) if Hardy's influence is indeed limited to
that first novel.

And why, furthermore, was Lawrence con,

cerned with an analysis of Hardy after Sons and Lovers

third and last novel of
tlie

his

early, Hardyesque period, was

finished, and during the last six revisions of the Sisters ?

Richard

D.

Beards makes

halting attempt to discover

Hardian themios in the later novels of Lawrence in his essay,

"D.
H.

Lawrence and The Study of Thomas Hardy

,

His Victorian

Predecessor" [sic]
rence
'

but
I

am interested primarily in Lavr-

characters.

suggest that Lawrence wrote his

he found in

study of Hardy with a very current interest:

the Hardy novels,

and particularly in the characters of

those novels, an artist grappling with the same kinds of

problems he had faced and was facing in his ovm novels.

The central problem of
Tlie

R eturn of the Native

,

Tess and

Jude, is that of
Love:

S ons

and Lover s, The Rainbow

and Women in

the effort of a character, or of characters, to find

42

and to establish

"best self," in Matthev; Arnold's terms,

in the widst of a world where the structure of the community

and the face of nature itself is changing.

Tess's journey

from Marlott to Stonehengc and Jude

'

trek from Marygreen

to Christminster are Paul Morel's journey from the ash-pits to the "humming,

glowing tovm," and the movement of the

Brangwen family from the Marsh to the "outer world" of the

university, and the hope of "a new world."

Lawrence's analysis of characters and human relationships in the Study involves,
I

suspect, two primary concerns,

He was not only trying to articulate a "structural skeleton"

for his future novels, including the work in progress; he was also attempting to clarify the fictional lives of his

characters in the book he had just finished.

Indeed, Lawa

rence's frequent attacks on Hardy's art often read like

vindication of his own, and with good reason:

not only is

the human condition sim.ilar in the \\?orks of the two novel-

ists, the characters themselves are often much alike.

Meta-

physically and aesthetically speaking, then, we may

viev/

Sons and Lovers partially as Lawrence's attempt to rewrite

Jud e the Obscure

just as Chapter IX of the Study is an ex-

pository attempt to explain the deficiencies and suggest

the alternative possibilities of Tess and Jude
.

A compari-

son of Sons and Lovers with Jude

along with Lawrence's

critical reactions to Hardy's novel, should illuminate our

understanding of the later novel.

It will

reveal what

43

conflicts Lav/rencc considers central to Hardy's novel and

consequently, to his own.

The contrasts bet^-een the two

novels may reveal, conversely, what Lawrence rejects in the

earlier novel from either an aesthetic or (more probably)

a

metaphysical point of view.

shall try to point out

some of the significant similarities and differences in

these two novels, and to suggest the implications each has

for Lav^rence's characters.
II

Just as Ward Hellstrom's article, "Hardy's Scholar-

Gipsy

,(^/

argues that "Hardy may have originally intended

[

to dreimatize in

Jude ] certain Arnoldian precepts, adhering

to some and rejecting others," Lawrence seems in Sons and

Lovers and the Study to have accepted some of Hardy's pre-

sentation of the human condition in Jude

all.

though by no means

Certainly both novels are concerned with the attempt

to attain the outer world or the "best self" by a character

positioned between the manual and intellectual worlds.

Jude Fawley is
a

stonemason who would be

scholar, and his

"ruling passion" is his desire to become

student at Christ

minster, his personal symbol of intellectual

truth.

beauty and

Jude roams the Wessex countryside, cutting stone

during the day and studying the classics at night, waiting

for his chance to enter Christminster as a scholar; but the

opportunity never comes.

Along

tlie

way, Jude is tricked

into marriage by the fleshly, sensuous country girl,

44

Arabella, who subsequently leaves him and reappears throughout the novel as the emblem of animal lust and bodily pleasure.

Jude also falls in love with Sue, his intellectual,

neurotic, virginal cousin whom he temporarily substitutes

for Christminster as his ideal of intellectual beauty.
Sue

gradually renounces her former intellectual aloofness for

a

demeaning Christian piety and subjection; Jude then rea

jects her as "not worthy of

man's love," and dies in sui'

cidal despair.

Christminster remains Jude

idealized "city

of light," nonetheless, to the end.

Jude

's

attempt to enter Christminster, which the nar-

rator ambigiously calls "his form of the modern vice of unrest,"

is

an attempt to establish a new or best self, a

self outside of social expectation or artifice, based on

something final, stable, and ideal:

"It had been the yearn-

ing of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling

to
--

for some place which he could call admirable.

. .

Should
'

he find that place in this city

.?"

(J 68).

To Jude

young mind the city is "a wonderful place for scholarship

and religion" (J 69), and he becomes primarily interested
in his own

'mental progress'

(J

79).

Lawrence says that

Jude concentrates on becoming "a non-developing quality,

an academic mechanism," and wants life "merely in the secon-

dary, outside form., in the consciousness.

to exist only in his mentality.

...

He wanted

He was as if bored in the

body.

This seems to be the result of coming of an

45

old family that had long been conscious, long self-conscious,

specialized, separate, exhausted."

For Lawrence, then, Jude

embodies the male principle of conscious mentality discussed

in the preceding chapter of this study.

This mental pre-

occupation, says Lawrence, "drove him to Sue," who, like

Jude, "wanted to live partially, in the consciousness,
the mind only.
in

She wanted no experience in the senses, she

(P 496)
.

wished only to knoAv"

Lawrence sees Sue as the

pure embodiment of one of the principles which operate in

Jude, the principle of mind.

Arabella is the embodiment of

the other principle, of the flesh, and "Jude contains them

both" (P 488)

Thus Lawrence sees Sue and Christminster as

'

manifestations of the same principle, and Jude

to each stemmdng from his love of mind,

attraction

or the conscious
a

life.

Jude

'

rejection of Arabella is, of course,

\\/orld,

rejec-

tion of the physical, fleshly

and it is this one-

sided development that kills Jude:

And this tragedy is the result of overdevelopment of one principle of human life at the expense of the other; an over-balancing; a laying of all the stress on the Male, the Love, the Spirit, the Mind, the Consciousness; a denying, a blaspheming against the Female, the Law, the Soul, the Senses, the Feelings. But she [Sue] is developed to the very extreme, she scarcely lives in the body at all. Being of the feminine gender, she is yet no woman at all, nor male; she is almost neuter. He [Jude] is nearer the balance, nearer the centre, nearer the v^/holeness. But the whole human effort, towards pure life in the spirit, towards becoming pure Sue, drags him along; he identifies himself with this effort, destroys himself and her in his adherence to this identification (P 509-510).

46

Paul Morel, the protagonist of Sons and Lovers

is

also stationed between the manual, rural world and the in-

tellectual world.
the coal

His father, Walter,

is

pit miner in

fields of Nottinghamshire, and his mother, Ger-

trude, is the daughter of an upper-middle class family

which "ignored all sensuous pleasure."

as

Walter is described
.

"soft, non-intellectual, warm,

gambolling"; Ger-

trude is his opposite:

ed very intellectual."''

"She loved ideas, and was consider-

Gertrude offers to her sons, as

a

Raymond Williams puts it, "a projected idea of what

life would be, what getting on would be
--

good

as

Clym's mother

had put it in The Return of the Native ."^

Paul chooses his

--

mother as an ideal as Jude chose Christminster

anchor for his soul:
li^'e.
. .
.

as

an

"Hers was the strongest tie in his

There was one place in the world that stood

the place where his

solid and did not melt into unreality:

mother was.

...

It was

as

if the pivot and pole of his

life, from which he could not escape, was his mother" (SL
222)
.

Paul rejects his swearing, hard-drinking, brawling

father for the intellectual, refined way of life his mother

represents, but it is clear that Mrs. Morel is not simply

an intellectual,

or cultural,

ideal.

Paul sees in Gertrude

It is

both

mental and physical ideality.

for this reason

that the

'bodiless' Miriam, who is so like Mrs. Morel in

many ways, is finally unable to replace Gertrude as Paul's

47

lover.

He tells Miriam in the cliapter entitled "Passion,"

"That's what one must have I think the real, real flame of Tceling through another person -- once, only once, if it only last three months. See, my mother looks as if she'd had everything that was necessary for her living and developing. There's not a tiny bit of feeling of sterility about her" (SL 317).
,
.
.

Later Paul says this

'baptism of fire in passion' "almost

seems to fertilise your soul and make it that you can go

on and mature." The novel thus saves Mrs. Morel from being

the "non-developing quality, an academic mechanism" that

Lawrence sees Jude becoming in his idealization and worship

of Christminster

Though the conflict in Jude between passion and mind

is

only

secondary consideration in that novel, the same

conflict in Sons and Lovers becomes the primary theme as

Paul matures.
In Paul's mind at least, Mrs.

Morel is an

ideal who incorporates both physical and mental qualities

of the best self.
In Miriam,

Paul finds the spiritual quali'

ties of his mother; and in Clara he finds physical satis-

faction, but neither woman incorporates both principles,

as Paul's

ideal must.

Like Arabella and Sue, Clara and

Miriam "represent the same pair of [male and female] principles"; and Paul, like Jude, "contains them both" (P 488).
In both novels

there is

structural positioning of charac-

ters, with the hero as focal point, which dramatizes the

conflicts of the story.

Lawrence makes this clear in Sons

48

and Lovers in the "Defeat of Miriam" chapter, where Paul finds himself stationed between Miriam's spiritual love on
the one hand, and Clara's acute physicality on the other:

"There was a triangle of antagonism between Paul and Clara

and Miriam"
(SL,

249).

The relationships between the central

forces of the two novels might be represented diagram-

matically:
The Ideal:

Christminster

The Ideal:

Mrs. Morel

Paul

antagonism

"

Arabella
(rural, physical)'

Sue (urban,

^ antagonism Miriam Clara (spirit) (passion)

intellectual)

One is almost forced to agree with Mark Schorer's

judgment that Lawrence is too close to Sons and Lovers

autobiographically speaking, and that the narrator in the

novel is not always obj.eet'ive--Qr trustworthy.
Paul tliinks "he loied Miriam his soul.
at the thought of Cl"ar^~;-T
.

For instance,
He grew warm

[But]

"

(Sj^

279).

Certainly it is

difficult, v;hen one encounters such passages, for the

reader to know whether it is really Miriam who is the "nun,"
as Paul calls her,

or Paul himself who makes her that way;

a

whether Clara has only

physical nature

--

or v/hether the

49

truth is that Paul sees only that side of

lier.

Neverthe-

less, even if the book is solely concerned with how things

appear to Paul, it succeeds because appearance is important;

appearance is

reality.

Whether Paul and the narrator

(they do often seem to be the same person, especially in

the earlier chapters of Part II)
are ultimately right about

the one-sided natures of Clara and Miriam is finally of lit-

tle importance, since the field of the novel is within Paul

himself.

He finally, rejects both women because he sees

them as embodying only one aspect of his ideal, an ideal

which has, like himself,

dual nature.

Unlike Jude

Paul

does not commit suicide at the loss of his ideal, though the

death of his mother leaves him whimpering in the streets.

In Lawrence's

rather weak ending, Paul marches off affirmaa

tively, resolutely, toward

Laurentian Christminster

Turning But no, he would not give in. sharply, he walked toward the city's gold His fists were shut, his phosphorescence. mouth set fast. He would not take that He walked direction, to follow her. towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.
III
In Another E go:

The Changing View of Self and Society

in the Work of D.

H.

Lawrence

Baruch Hochmann says, "we

*Cf. young Jude's vision of Christminster from the Brown House: "No individual light was visible, only a halo or glow-fog over-arching the place against the black heavens behind it, making the light and the city seem disIn the glow he seemed to see tant but a mile or so. Phillotson promenading at ease, like one of the forms in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace" (1, iii)
. .

H
50

have in Sons and Lovers the first clear depiction of

10 th(

process of self-realization as conceived and enunciated in

the Hardy "study": the process of coming-into-bcing on the

high road of love and of its unfolding in relation to the

greater life of nature."

This is,

think, an accurate

description of Paul's road to self-realization, and it is

an important variance from Jude
'

quest for his best self.

'

As Ward Ilellstrom points out, Jude

real impulse is intel-

lectual and cultural.

Even his interest in Sue Bridehead

stems from his "v/ish for intellectual sympathy":"

Though he is denied a university degree and ordination and finally Sue, [Jude] remains free to cultivate his best self, what Arnold calls in "The Buried Life" his "genuine self." He remains constant to his search after knov^'ledge of his buried life, constant to his attempt to expand his powers and add to his growth in wisdom.
For Paul Morel and for Lawrence, on the other hand, the way
to wholeness of being is through love, rather than culture.
In his

analysis of Jude in the Hardy study, Lawrence implies

that Jude would have found his best self without Christ-

minster, had he only been able to establish

sexual relationship with Arabella or Sue.

satisfactory

In sexual consum-

mation, rather than culture or learning, Lawrence says wisdom

is to be

found,

a:id

the self discovered.

At the risk of

repetition, let me again quote the central passage from the

Hardy Study in this regard;

51

In Love, in the act of love, that which is mixed in me becomes pure, tliat which is female in me is given to the female, that which is male in her draws into me, I am complete, I am pure male, she is pure female; we rejoice in contact perfect and naked and clear, singled out unto ourselves, and given the surpassing freedom. No longer we see through a glass, darkly. For she is she, and I am I, and, clasped together with her, I know how perfectly she is not me, how perfectly I am not her, how utterly we are two, the ligh-t and the darkness, and hov^^ infinitely and eternally not-to-becomprehended by either of us is the surpassing Yet of this One, this incompreOne we make. hensible, we have an inkling that satisfied

us

(P

468)

Jude acts according to the dictates of his best self

when he obeys his own conscience and personal moral code,

when he does not pervert his actions by sim.ple compliance

with "social formulas"

(J

367).

12

The primary act of bad

faith in Jude the Obscure is to act in mechanical accordance

with externally ordained social "roles," to be Phillotson

the outraged husband, or Sue the humble, obedient, and self-

sacrificing wife.

As Sue herself says, "the social moulds

civilization fits us into have no more relation to our

actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns" (J 247).

Throughout

the book there is a constant and agonizing disparity be-

tween social forms and individual needs, between the uniqueness of the individual and the constraints of social con-

vention.
is

There is

'logic'

to those conventions, as there

indeed logic in Tetuphenay's "terribly sensible" advice

to Jude to "stick to your trade," but there is no humanity.

52

no allowance for human aspiration and grandeur.

Sue's use

o John Stuart Mill may be seen to illustrate the central

moral point of the novel:

"She, or he,

'who lets the vrorld,

or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him,

has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of

imitation'" (J 265).

Again quoting Mill, Sue says "'Human

is

development in its richest diversity'

above respectability," and
idea.
I

to my mind far

think the novel affirms this

Ultimately, only Jude remains above convention; as

Phillotson seeks to regain some of his former social standing, Sue finds solace in role-playing, and Arabella dons

once more her mask of dimples.

Sue,

it seems,

is

right when

she says "domestic laws should be made according to tenpera-

ments, which should be classified.

If people are at all

peculiar in character they have to suffer from the very

rules that produce comfort in others!" (J 264).
In his

speech to the crowd at his return to Christminster, Jude voices his abhorrence of social roles and conventions,
and

describes his personal moral imperative of

'following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to there is I perceive those I love best. ... something wrong somewhere in our social formu"For who knoweth vv'hat is good for las. man in this life? -- and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?"' (J 567).
. .
.

Jude
(as both

'

'high road' to the self is his "ruling passion"

the attainment of cul-

Arabella and Sue call it):

ture.

This is what the journey from Marygreen to

53

Christminster

is

all about.

Sue says of Phillotson,

tlie

"he

had the same hankering for

University that you [Jude]

had" (J 368); and Phillotson's capitulation to the forces

of convention and social

'moulds'

counterpoints and empha-

sizes Jude

'

affirmation of his self.

is

Whatever the role of sex

in Jude

it is not the

means toward achieving or knowing the radically individual

self.

This is,

think, the central difference between the

two novels:

both are concerned with finding and holding to

the best self, but the means by which one gains that self
are different.

Lawrence, like Hardy, is quite concerned

In the

with 'human development in its richest diversity.'

Hardy Study

he says

It seems as though one of the conditions of life is, that life shall continually and progressively differentiate itself, almost as though this differentiation were a Purpose. Life starts crude and unspecified, a great Mass. And it proceeds to evolve out of that mass ever more distinct and definite particular forms, as if it were working always to the production of the infinite number of perfect individuals, the individual so thorough that he should have nothing in common with any other individual.
. . .

The more I am singled out into utter individuality, the more this intrinsic me rejoices (P 431-432)
As
I

pointed out in part

II

of this chapter, the road to

the self, for Lawrence, is "love, the act of love."

Thus

Miriam and Clara polarize Paul Morel's spiritual and sexual

needs in love, where Sue and Arabella dramatize Jude
'

54

levels of intellection.

The structural balancing of the

characters is quite similar, but the epistemological emphasis is altered.

Lawrence reads Hardy (as, indeed, he reads

everything) in sexual terms.

Hardy considered Jude

a

'

sexual

problems,

suspect, only one manifestation of

poor, rural,

idealistic young man attempting to attain to the condition

of sv\?eetness and light.
IV

With the idea in mind of what "coming into being," or

attaining the best self, means for Hardy and what it means
for Lawrence, let us examine three pairs of characters from
the two novels for what such
a

comparison can reveal to us

.

about the people of Sons and Lovers

The original role of Sue Bridehead and Miriam Lev-e^s

is,
as
I

have said, that of counterpoints tp Arabella Donn

and Clara Dawes.

Together Miriam and Clara make, as Law-

rence says Sue and Arabella make "one complete marriage:

that is, the two women added together made One Bride"
(P

500)

Each of the

v.'omen

represents one side of the hero, and the

13

hero thinks of his two women as contrasting opposites.

As
[

have pointed out, Lawrence's interest in the polarity

and he

of Sue and Arabella is sexual rather than cultural,

accordingly arranges his own contrasting females in sexual

opposition.
^

55

Sue and Miriam describe the puritanical side o this

sexual contrast;

tliey

are examples of what one critic has

called
\\fould

"

sublim ated sexualit^y^J*

and what psychologists

no doubt label

'frigid' wo}nen.

Jude thinks or speaks

of Sue at one time or another in the novel as "almost a

divinity," "ethereal," "uncarnate," "aerial," "spirit,

disembodied creature
.

hardly flesh"; as a "phantasmal,

bodiless creature," "a sort of fay, or sprite," and calls

her "least sensual."
lover,
Sue wants Jude to kiss her "as a
;

incorporeally"

and Jude tells her that she has

15

"little animal passion."

as

Similarly, Miriam is described

a

"romantic in her soul," and "mystical," as

girl who

"by her religious intensity" was cut off from the ordinary

world, "which m.ade the world for her either

den or
a

nunnery gar-

paradise."

Miriam's body "was not flexible and

Jude contrasts

living," and she is "physically afraid."

the "tight, apple-like convexities" of Sue's body to

"Arabella's amplitudes," and Miriam reflects Sue's quality

of clenched physicality:

"Everything was gripped stiff with

intensity, and her effort, overcharged, closed in on it-

self."^^
Like Sue, Miriam "wished she were a man," and Miriam

associates this desire with the desire for knov-;ledge, or

culture:
"I should think women ought to be as glad to be women as men are to be men," Paul said.

56

"No!" -- she shook her head Everything the men have."

--

"no!

"But what do you want?" he asked.

"I

want to learn" (SL 154-155).

Lawrence views Sue Bridehead in the Study as living according to "the ultra-Christian principle
--

of living entirely

according to the Spirit," identifying herself "utterly with

the male principle."
17

He has drawn

Miriam in the same

knowing
,

mold:

she is concerned primarily

V'/ith

religious

(she sings

"like

nun, like a Botticelli Madonna"), and

She too asks

repulsed by the physical ("she had no body").

for (as Lawrence says of Sue in the Study )

"v-zhat

perhaps no

man can give:

(P

passionate love without physical desire"

509).

Perhaps the best example of the similarity between Sue

and Miriam is found in a set of parallel episodes concerning roses.
In the earlier novel,

Jude

Sue and Father Time

are wandering about the Agricultural Fair at Stoke-Barehills

under the watchful eye of Arabella.

Eventually the three

enter the pavilion of flowers, and Arabella spies

Sue detaining Jude almost against his will while she learnt the names of this variety and that, and put her face v;ithin an inch of their blooms to sm.ell them.
'I should like to push my face quite into them -- the dears!' she has said (J 337).

Lawrence remarks on this scene in the Study

57

The real marriage of Jude and Sue was in the Then, in the third state, in the spirit, roses. these two beings met upon the roses and in the The roses were symbolized in consummation. rose is the symbol of marriage -- consummation in its beauty. To them it is more than a symbol, it is a fact, a flaming experience.

And then They went home tremblingly glad. the horror when, because of Jude's unsatisf action The flaming experience he must take Sue sexually. became a falsity, or an ignis f atuus leading them on (P 506-507)
Sue and Jude, then, consummate their spiritual union in the

roses, but this kind, of consummation is not, at last,

enough for Jude, as it will not be enough for Paul Morel.

In the "Lad-and-Girl

Love" chapter of Lawrence's novel,

Paul and Miriam also have a passionate "comraunion" over

roses, but while Miriam walks home afterwards "feeling her

soul satisfied with the holiness of the night," Paul feels

"anxious and imprisoned"

(SL^

160).

Later Paul despises

Miriam for her unearthly affection for flowers:

flowers appealed with such [Miriam] strength she felt she must make them part HTien she bent and breathed a of herself. flower, it was as if she and the flower Paul hated her were loving each other.
To
,

for it

(SJ^

173).
a

These similar episodes display

quality of Sue and

Both women

Miriam which can be described only as ethereal.

eventually feel compelled to combat that ethereality by sacrificing their virginal beings, in order to keep their
lovers.

Lawrence calls Sue's sexual relations with Jude

a

"a submission, a service,

slavery"; in his novel Miriam

v^^ith

regards sexual intercourse

Paul a "suffering" and

"sacrifice"

(SIL

284).

Oddly enough, perhaps, Lawrence

'

views Sue's accession to Jude

able nullification of self,

sexual desires as

lament-

"a profanation and a pollution,"

in which Sue breaks the unique

form of herself

(P_

504)

Her marriage to Jude is damned, says Lawrence, "partly by

their very being, but chiefly by their incapacity to accept

the conditions of their own and each other's being" (P 505).

This is, it seems to me, an overly complex way of saying that Sue and Jude
(and Paul and Miriam)
are incompatible.

If one of the lovers accepts the conditions of the other's

being, he denies the conditions of his own being.

Damnation

seems inevitable, sexually speaking, for both couples.

V/hen La\\frence

finally does create

sexually compatible
,

couple of two highly developed individuals in Women in Love

he does not choose such disjunctive sexual beings to do it.

If Miriam and Sue and disciples of Venus Urania,

"where

desire plays only

secondary part"
.

(J

210), Clara and Ara-

bella hail Aphrodite Pandemos

Both of these women are

creatures of almost pure physicality, and both introduce

their lovers into physical manhood.

Lawrence says of Ara-

bella in the Hardy Study, "Arabella brought [Jude] to himself, gave him himself, made him free, sound as a physical

male" (P 494)

These women lead their lovers to knowledge

;

of "the primal impulses that rise in them" (P 418)

and

Clara, like Arabella, celebrates a "baptism of fire in

59

passion" (SL 318) which awakens her lover to his physical

self.

One must remember the lengths to which Lawrence

in the Study
,

goes,

to vindicate Arabella as a healthy,

generic woman of passion.

He calls lier,

amazingly enough,

"in character somewhat an aristocrat," and compares her to

Hardy's Eustacia Vye

(P

490).

Lawrence's reading is no

doubt an extreme one, but it is of use to us to see Ara-

bella through his eyes, for his picture of Hardy's sensual

female becomes Clara in his own novel. Perhaps, in this

regard, even the similarity of the sound of the names is

not insignificant'.

Lawrence objects to Hardy's unsympathetic portrayal of

Arabella:
"he must have his personal revenge on her for

her coarseness, which offends him, because he is something

of an Angel Clare"
(P

489)

In both the Study and his

novel, Lawrence beautifies the blunt physicality of the two

women.
His picture of Clara seems especially reminiscent

of the Arabella of Lawrence's essay on Hardy;

Clara sat leaning on the table, holding aloof. [Paul] noticed her hands were large, And tlie skin on them seemed but well kept. almost coarse, opaque, and white. She did not mind if he observed her hands. Her heavy arm She intended to scorn him. Her mouth lay negligently on the table. was closed as if she were offended, and she kept her face slightly averted (SL^ 230)
. .
.
.

Clara is developed as

character of generic female sexual-

ity by the frequent descriptions of her ripe, heavy body,

by frequent references to Paul's sexual desire for her.

60

and by a barrage of allusions to Clara as the Queen of

Sheba, Eve, Juno, and Penelope.

as simply "the woman," and refers

Paul often thinks of her

to her as a natural
(SL^

"force," and "strange, life wild at the source"

353).

Clara is imagistically linked with the great stallion of

Chapter IX,
with
tiie

recurrent Laurentian symbol of sexuality,

v\rhich
(SL^

sea, and with the river Trent,

is

compared
.

to the torrential emotion of love-making

363)

Ara-

bella is also revealed imagistically by Hardy; she is in-

evitably linked with the pig's pizzle which she throws at

Jude in the opening chapter.

Perhaps we can agree with

Lawrence that this is hardly a sympathetic representation

of the kinds of things Arabella comes to stand for in Jude

Lawrence's analysis of Arabella concludes that she

fails Jude because of her "selfish instinct for love,"

because she does not give herself to him

failure with Paul is similar:

(P

493).

Clara's

she is unable to give of

herself, chiefly because she is afraid of Paul's changelinj

personality.

Paul offers her no "security" or "surety,"

and Clara is unwilling to embrace Paul's deiaand for "a

sense of freedom" in love

(SL^

360).

Clara has, however,

"gained herself" in her affair with Paul:

But at any rate, she kne^^f now, she was sure of herself. And the same could almost be said of him.. Together they had received the baptism of life, each through the other; but now their missions were separate (SL 361)

Clara can now accept her itusband because she has gained

self-knowledge through passion, and because she can feel

secure in Dawes' affection.

Clara is "'saved,' restored,

and to her husband" by

to realization of herself as woman,

the fire of passion; not,

it,

as John Edward Hardy would have

as

by "the artist

[Paul]

savior."

This identification

of the means of salvation is important because it is the

center of value in Sons and Lovers

Clara, Paul, and even

Mrs. Morel are given- self -hood through baptism in passion.

Miriam, on the o^ller hand, seems irrevocably lost.

Jude and Paul contain the opposite poles of being

v/hich are represented by their women.

Again, Lawrence sees

Hardy's character in terms which seem to describe his own.

As
as
I

have suggested, Jude and Paul become whole through sex,

As he says in the Study
,

Lawrence views it.

Jude "be-

comes a grown,

independent man in the arms of Arabella,

conscious of having met, and satisfied, the female demand

in him.

This makes a man of any youth.

a
.

He is proven unto

himself as
life.
is
. .

male being, initiated into the freedom of

She gave him to himself"
(P

493-494).

This

precisely the point that Sons and Lovers makes about

that his love-making with Clara gives him the freedom
SL^

P"aul,

and knowledge to be himself (cf.

.354;

361).

In this act

of sexual consummation, Paul establishes his male identity,

symbolically assuming the dialect of his father for the

62

occasion.

Lawrence reads Jude and writes Sons and Lovers

from the perspective that makes "struggle into being"

tlirough sexual experience the controlling theme and central

issue of both novels.

Initially, Paul is "like too many

(SL^

young men of his own age"

276)

and in the manner of

Hardy's Angel Clare who is "a sample product of the last

19 five-and- twenty years," afraid of sexuality, tending more

toward the ethereal and imaginative life.

The "male prin-

ciple" of intellection is exalted, according to Lawrence,

in the Fawley family of which Jude and Sue are the issue
(P

494),

and it is obviously exalted in Gertrude Morel's

father, "who preferred theology in reading, and who drew

near in sympathy only to one man, the Apostle Paul; who

was harsh in government, and in familiarity ironic; who

ignored all sensuous pleasure" (SL 10).

is

If Jude

'

being

split between flesh and mind, Paul's existence is "one

(SL^

internecine battle"

173) between the spiritual and the

physical v/orlds, between the male and female principles of

being.

Jude, says Lawrence, is unsatisfied with either Sue

or Arabella because he lacks that consuimnative experience

with

woman which would unfold for him the mysteries of

life and the self:

wanted the consummation of marriage that deepest experience, that penetrating far into the unknown and undiscovered which lies in the body and blood of man and woman, during life. He wanted to receive from her the quickening, the
[Jude]
.
.
.

63

primitive seed and impulse which should start him to a new birth. And for this he must go back deep into the primal, unshown, unknown life of the blood, the thick source-stream of life in her (P 503).

Whatever this mysterious "life of the blood"

is

that Jude

craves, it is fairly obvious that Lawrence gives it to

Paul, whose love-making with Clara

included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.*
They felt small, half-afraid, childish and wondering, like Adam and Eve when they lost their innocence and realised the magnificance of the power which drove them out of Paradise and across the great night and It was for each the great day of humanity. of them an initiation and a satisfaction. To know their own nothingness, to know the tremendous living flood which carried them always, gave them rest within themselves. If so great a magnificent power could overwhelm them, identify them altogether with itself, so that they knew they were only grains in the tremendous heave that lifted every grass blade its little height, and every tree, and living thing, then why fret about themselves? They could let themselves be carried by life, and they felt a sort of peace each in the other. There was a verification which they had had together. Nothing could nullify it, nothing could take it away; it was almost their belief in life.
It was as if they had been blind agents of a great force (SL 353-354)

^Lawrence's cosmic ontological view of being and sexual consummation is not complex, and might be best outlined by a few lines from a well-known poem by Dylan Thomas, who displays a similar view of reality:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

64

With this passage, Lawrence has rectified the 'shortcomings'

of Jude the Obscure
:

he has given Paul the

"new birth"
Avas

which evaded Jude, and he has allowed his hero, as Jude

not allowed, to discover his best self where, Lav/rence

would say, it ought to and must be found

--

in tlie cosmic

mystery of sexual consummation.

Both Jude and Paul, it seems clear, realize their mistake in attempting to achieve satisfaction with Sue and
r^liriam,

witli

whom they have so much in common, but who are,

virgins by nature.
Jude says to Sue, "'I se-a

as

it were,
.

duced you.

You

v^^ere

distinct type

refined

creature, intended by Nature to be left intact'" (J 383).

Love-making with Miriam gives Paul "alv/ays the sense of

failure and of death," and eventually "he realized, consciously,
tlt.at

it was no good.

It was useless

trying:
.

it

would never be a success between them" (SL 292)

tagonists, then, learn the
as well as

Both proin others

'conditions of being'

themselves.

For Jude, this learning process is

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer.

The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams Turns mine to wax.

And I am dumb to tell the Lover's tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked v/orm.
(

Collecte d
1-3;

11.

P oems [New York: New Directions, 6-8; 21-22).

195 7]

p.

10;

65

an end:
is a

Jiide

is a
,

life -story.

So ns and Lovers

however,

bildungsroman
It

and at its end Paul is on the threshold

in this essential distinction that the

of adulthood.

is

fundamental differences in the cliaracters and characterization of the two novels may be said to lie.

V
Perhaps the most significant difference between Jude
the Obscure and Sons and Lovers is the centrality in the

former, and the abse-nce in the latter of

controlling com-

munity structure.

The drama of Jude Fawley unfolds in the

conflict between man and society, between Jude the individual and abstract societal norms.
the novel is that "'social moulds

One of the key issues of

.
.

.have no relation
(J 247);

to our actual shapes,'" as Sue puts it

the in-

dividual is not accommodated by society.

like between "gown life" and "town life"

Jude moves crab(J

162)

between

the rude village of Marygreen and the mystic spires of

Christminster.
Jude is full of scenes which dramatize the dual nature
of the protagonist's personality,
--

that he is a laborer

and

scholar at once.

One such scene occurs at Christmin-

ster, on the night Jude has received the letter from Tetu-

phenay advising him to stick to his trade.

Jude wanders

subsequently about the city, entering

of common people,

public bar full

and eventually proceeding liome

66

choosing a circuitous route homeward to pass the gates of the College whose Head [Tetuphenay] had just sent him the note.
The gates were shut, and, by impulse, he took from his pocket the lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there, and wrote along the v\fall:
I have understanding as well as you; yea, who am not inferior to you: knoweth not such things as these? ~ Job xii.3 (J 1671~r
'

'

Throughout the novel we see Jude "as

workman" and as a

self-taught scholar, and we see the forms of society refusing to accomjnodate Jude
'

uniqueness.

"The modern vice

is a

of unrest," which the narrator attributes to Jude,

vice primarily because of society's inability, or unwillingness, to adapt to the needs and desires of "human develop-

ment in its richest diversity." conflict with

liis

Jude is, to be sure, in

self; but the fundamental conflict of his

life is with the "social moulds" and "formulas" of his age.

Paul Morel, on the other hand, is not involved with

his community's structure. He is, of course, attempting

to construct a new morality in which he can live.

For

Paul, however, this activity involves a withdrawal from

society rather than a continued confrontation with it, as

we have in Jude.

Paul is not concerned with Nottingham

.

as Jude is with Christminster

He is concerned with

"Being," or "the great unknown," or some other such cosmic

concept.

Paul's turning toward "the faintly humming, glowI

ing town" at the end of the novel is not,

suspect, so

67

much a renewed confrontation with society as it is a choice

of life over death.

This final decision resolves the

problem of the last chapter, entitled "Derelict":

So the weeks went on. Always alone, his soul oscillated, first on the side of death, then on the side of life, doggedly. The real agony was that he had nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to say, and was nothing himself. Sometimes he ran down the streets as if he were made; sometimes he was mad; things weren't there, things were there. It made him pant. Sometimes he stood before the bar of the public-house where he called for a drink. Everything suddenly stood back away from him. He saw the face of the barmaid, the gabbling drinkers, his own glass on the slopped, mahogany board, in the distance. There was sometliing between him and them. He could not get into touch. He did not want them; he did not want his drink. Turning abruptly, he went out. On the threshold he stood and looked at the lighted street. But he was not of it or in it. Something separated him. Everything went on there below those lamps,, shut a\-iay from him. He could not get at them. He felt he couldn't touch the lampposts, not if he reached. Where could he go? There was nowhere to go, neither back into the inn, or forward anywhere. Pie felt stifled. There was nowhere for him. The stress grew inside him; he felt he should smash (SL 412)

Paul ultimately affirms life

--

alone.

He refuses Miriam's

maternal, self-sacrificing embrace; and he gives Clara

back to her husband.
Jude dies
a

Samsonian death as

tragic prisoner in an alien society; Paul embraces his role

as "a tiny upright speck" in the

immense, timeless cosmos,

Raymond V/illiams sees the distinction here when he

writes, "Hardy does not celebrate isolation and separation.
He mourns them."
20

Jude

'

inability to find his just

68

place in the world of men is, for Hardy, the most tragic
of possibilities.

But Lawrence,

in Sons and Lovers

U'oinen

in

The Rainbow

and most finally in

in Love

dramatizes

the conflict of the self with itself,

and celebrates the

2

star-like singularity of the individual.

from Mar/green to Christminster is
a

The journey

cultural and social

journey, but the journey from Paul Morel's ash-pits to the

"phosphorescent" city is
quest.

psychological and religious

Paul's trek,, which will be made again by the Brang,

wen family in The Rainbow

moves toward individuation,

.

self-knowledge, and self -fulfillment

The only means of

In the physical

transportation in this journey

is

love.

and spiritual consummation of love the "unknown," that is,

the invisible part of the person, the unconscious mind and
the hidden emotions and passions,
is made knovm,

at least

to the self.

This is how self-hood is achieved (e.g.,

Vi'ill

Mrs. Morel, Paul Morel, Clara, Tom Brangwen,

Brangwen,

Ursula, Rupert Birkin)

Furthermore, not only is the

"^

journey made through love, but the "new world" 2 ^ itself

shall be established by the experience and values of "the
love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man.

The via

m edia to being,

for man or woman,

is

love,

and love alone."

The struggle into individual and isolated being is the

struggle of
of a
nev\f

S ons

and Love rs and The Rainbow

a

the foundation

world, of

modern community, is the subject of

Women in Love

NOTES

CHAPTER

II

-"-

Modern Fiction Studies

(Spring 1959),

19-28.

Other brief comments suggesting Hardy's influence on The White Peacock include Graham Hough, The Dark Sun (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1959), pp. 24, 27; Kenneth Young, D. H. Lawrence (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), p. 19; Anthony West, D. H. Lawrence (London: Arthur Baker, 1950), p. 112; William York Tindall, P. H. Lawrence and Susan His Co w (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 201; and Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence: (New York: Duell, Sloan Portrait of a Genius But and Pearce, 1950), p. 122.
.

The D. H.

Lawrence Review

(Fall 1969),

210-29.

Unpublished.
I have used the Standard Edition (New York: p. 127. Harper and Row, 1966), ed. and with intro. by Robert B. Hereafter cited as J in text. Heilman.

Phoenix
7

p.

495.

Hereafter cited as

in text.

p.

9;
q

Sons and Lovers (New York: Viking Press, 1958), hereafter cited as SIL in the text.

The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (New York 175. Oxford University Press, 1970) p
,
.

A Study See Louis L. Martz, "Portrait of Miriam: ed. in the Design of Sons and Lovers ," Ima g ined V>'orlds Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London: Methuen, 1968), 343-70, for an intriguing analysis of Paul's inability to see Miriam as she really is.
,

Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970,

30.

11

Unpublished.

69

70

This compliance, on the other hand, is Phillotson's great shortcoming; see Norman Holland, " Jude the Obscure Hardy's Symbolic Indictment of Christianity," NineteenthCentury Fiction 9: 51.
:

12

See Jude part III, chap. 9, 10; IV, 5; and Sons and Lovers p. 279. Also see Robert B. Heilman's article, "Hardy's Sue Bridehead," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20 (March, 1966), 307-23.
,
,

13

Ward Hellstrom, " Jude the Obscure as Pagan Selfassertion," Victorian Newsletter No. 29: 26.
,

14

V/ords or phrases in quotation marks are taken from the following chapters, respectively: III, 3; III, 9; III, 9; IV, 3; IV, 5; V, 1; VI, 3; VI, 3; V, 4; and V, 1.

148,

153,

Quoted descriptions of Miriam taken from pages 142, 152, and 154, respectively.
,

Phoenix p. 496, 498. In "Hardy's Sue Bridehead," Robert Heilman says the same thing more formally, w^^ithout the Laurentian jargon: "[Sue's] deficiency in sex, whatever its precise psychological nature, is a logical correlative of her enthroning of critical intellect" (319)
IS Man in tlie Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 61.

Tess of the d Urbervilles (New York: Norton, 1965), 221. After Sons and Lovers was completed, Lawrence wrote to Edward Garnett, "Its the tragedy of thousands of young men in England -- it may even be Bunny's [Lawrence's friend David Garnett's] tragedy. I think it was Ruskin's, and men like him" ( Collected Letters ed. Moore p 161)
'

19

p.

20

IVilliams, p.

117.

In the Study (e.g., p. 419-21; 479-82), Lawrence continually complains that Hardy and Tolstoy allow the social code of conventional morality to punish and destroy the protagonist. At one point, Lawrence charges that this "is the weakness of modern tragedy, where transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate. Like Clym [Yeobright] the map appears to us more real than the land. Shortsighted almost to blindness, we pore over the chart, map out journeys, and confirm them: and we canno.t see life itself giving us the lie the whole time" (p. 420).
,

"

71

^'^

be

Collected Letters new world.

ed.

Moore, p.

422:

"There must

CHAPTER III
A STUDY CONNECTING THE OLD AND THE NEW: OF THE CHARACTERS OF THE RAINBOW

under your surface personality you will find you have a great desire to drink life direct from the source, not out of bottles and bottled personal vessels.
If you will go down into yourself,

What the old people call immediate contact with

God.

That strange essential communication of life not bottled in human bottles.

what even the wild witchcraft of the past was seeking before it degenerated.
Life from the source, unadulterated with the human taint.

Contact with the sun of suns that shines soinewhere in the atom, somewhere pivots the curved space, and cares not a straw for the put-up human figments

Communion with the Godhead, they used to say

in the past. But even that is human-tainted now, tainted with the ego and the personality.

To feel a fine, fine breeze blowing through the navel and the knees and have a cool sense of truth, inhuman truth at last softly fluttering the senses, in the exquisite orgasm of coition with the godhead of energy that cannot tell lies.

72

73

The cool, cool truth of pure vitality pouring into the veins from the direct contact with the source. Uncontaminated by even the beginnings of a lie. The soul's first passion is for sheer life entering in shocks of truth, unfouled by lies.

And the soul's next passion is to reflect and then turn round and embrace the extant body of life with the thrusting embrace of new justice, new justice between men and men, men and v;omen, and earth and stars, and suns. The passion of justice being profound and subtle and changing in a flow as all passions change.
But the passion of justice is a primal embrace between man and all his known universe.

And the passion of truth is the embrace between man and his god in the sheer coition of the life-flow, stark and unlying. D. H. Lawrence, Th e Primal Passions

If the marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel had suc-

ceeded, it might have looked something like the relationship of Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky in Lawrence's next

novel, The Rainbovv.

In this novel,

which unfolds the tale

of three generations of the Brangwen family aspiring

toward and finally reaching modernity, Lawrence employs

many of the same elements of character we observed in Sons

and Lovers.

Furthermore, The Rainbow seems to have as its

literary ancestor another Hardy novel. The Return of th e

Native (1878).

Whether or not this new employment of

a

Hardian themes was

conscious adaptation is of little

74

importance:

an investigation of this parallel will illumiIf we

nate the art and characters of Lawrence's novel.

add a third element, that of developing imagination, we

will have,

think, the formula for examining the charac:

ters of The Rainbow

reworking of old characters, adapta-

tion of another writer's characters, and imaginative devel-

opment toward Lawrence's self -proclaimed "new characters."

Th e R a inbow begins with the same metaphysical polarity

with wliich So ns and Lovers began:

"sensuous

non-

intellectual" men contrasted by (and married to) women who

have or desire intellectual consciousness (SL 9-10).
Here

again the characters embody the dialectical principles

which Lawrence sees at the center of all life:

flict of
tlie
iM'ale

the con-

Principle, representing mind, knowledge,

and consciousness, with the Fem.ale Principle, representing

the senses,

feeling, and unconscious connection with the

primal impulses of life.

These principles are also re-

versed in their embodiment in the characters, as they were

in Sons and Lov ers
;

the men embody the Female Principle of

"blood intimacy" with the earth:

They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young They knew the intercourse born on the earth. between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autum.n, showing the birds' nests no Their life and interlonger worth hiding. relations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow

75

for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet witli a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. TJie young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. Tliey took the udder of the cows the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men.T,

And

tlie

women embody the first stirrings of the Male Prin-

ciple, the desire for consciousness and articulation:

The women were different. On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy. But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.
.

The v/omen wanted another form of life She stood to see the far-off world of cities and governments and the active scope of man, the magic land to her, where secrets were made knovv'n and desires fulfilled (R 2,3).
.

These genora]ized characterizations represent the inclinations of the men and women of the Brangwen family before
1840, but the same polarity of being exists in Tom Brangwen
and Lydia Lensky, the first generation with which this

chronicle is intimately concerned.

Arising from this

structural contrast of opposing principles, however, Tom

and Lydia become "everynan" characters, representing types
of men and women in the rural world of the Marsh Farm.
2

Tom Brangwen inherits from his ancestors

and a mode of viewing
tiie

manner of living

world which is intiinately

76

connected to the land.

He is a representative of the un--

conscious, rural community

with one exception.

Tom is

affected throughout his life by "his mother's conception"

(R 10)

of what he should be, of what the good life is.

Tom's mother v/ants him to become conscious, wants him to

develop an intellective and articulate nature, and to thi s

end she sends him to school
and Paul
(cf.

Mrs. Morel sending V/illi am

to school to escape the colliery pits).

This

attempt to escape the "inner world" of the Brangwen farm

is
a

failure:

"For [Tom] there was nothing palpable,

nothing known in himself, that he could apply to learning"

(R 11); but it
is

this struggle, this attempt to develop

conscious being, that is the central struggle of the first

three quarters of the novel.

Perhaps the issue may be stated simply: achieve self -fulfillment in

a

in order to

modern world, one must become

a

modern; and being modern demands

precarious balance of

intellectual and physical completeness.

The demand for intellectual development apparently

coincides, for Lawrence, with the coming of the machine.

In Tom Brangwen 's childhood

("about 1840") the Marsh sufa

fers an '"invasion" by the machine:

canal and a railroad

cut off the farm from the city, and a colliery is sunk on
the other side of the canal.

However,

the Marsh remained remote and original, on the old, quiet side of the canal embankment,
in the sunny valley where slow water wound along in company of stiff alders, and the road went under the ash-trees past the Brangwen's garden gate (R 6)

77

The farm remains rural, despite the "trespass" of industry;

but it does not remain untouched.

The canal makes the

Brangwens "strangers in their own place," and the engines

of the trains are "a narcotic to the brain."
Tlie

approach

of the modern, industrial world induces a mixed response

in the rural people

The shrill Avhistle of the trains re-echoed through the heart, with fearsome pleasure, announcing the far-off come near and imminent (R 7)
.

The echoes of Hardy are,

think, fairly evident,

a

though Hardy's world of Egdon Heath is only

place for Lawrence.
as

starting

The description of Egdon in the Study

"the dark, powerful source whence all things rise into

. .

being

.,

the primal impulsive body

(P

[which]

goes on pro-

ducing all that was to be produced"

the Marsh Farm,

418), also describes

from which all the characters spring and

In the Author's
,

to which they must all return.

Preface to

the 1895 edition of The Return of the Native

Hardy writes,

"the date at v;hich the following events are assumed to have

occurred may be set down as between 1840 and 1850,"

and

Lawrence specifically begins his story of Tom Brangwen at

about the same time
(R 6).

Tom's father, Alfred, is

man

who "followed his natural inclinations," and who is reminiscent, perhaps, of the rustics of the Heath.
The Rainbow

really begins, however, with Tom, who is the first Brangwen

male to feel the intimations of desire to become conscious.

78

The first chapter of the book, entitled "How Tom

Brangwcn Married

Polish Lady," is about the result of

those intimations.

Unable to become conscious himself,

Tom is drawn to dreams "of foreign parts," though he is incapable of escape from the Marsh:
"it was a \Aery strong

root which held him to the Marsh, to his own house and

land" (R 21)

Thus when Tom sees Lydia Lensky for the

. . .

first time, he says, "'That's her'

involuntarily,"

automatically voicing his desire to graph onto himself some

element of the conscious world.
Lydia is the high-born

widow of

Polish revolutionary, and is, in Tom's eyes,

Lydia is "over-con-

from "another world of life" (R 27).

scious," "strange," and "foreign," but Tom sees their marriage as fated, and world transforming:
It was coming, he knew, his fate. The world was submitting to its transformation. He made no move: it would come what would

come (R 27)

Tom and Lydia thus not only embody the inale- female

dialectic outlined in the Study (and apparent in the relationship of Gertrude and Walter Morel)
a
,

they also represent

natural development in the "greater ordering" of the

.

world (R 35)
to

This marriage of the unconscious rural world

the "over-conscious" foreign one is "natural," "fated,"

and "ordained."

The outcome of this marriage is a two-fold

(R 34)

rebirth:

first, as both cliaxact ers are "reboxn "

in

the other, Tom gains knowledge of himself in his sexual

79

consummation with Lydia, just

as
,

Arabella reveals Jude to

and Paul achieves self-

himself (according to Lawrence)

knowledge through Clara:

[Tom] let go his hold on himself, he relinquished himself, and knew the subterranean force of his desire to come to her, to be with her, to mingle with her, losing himself to find her, to find himself in her (R 90)

Tom is ultimately, however, "without understanding" and

"unsatisfied" (R 124)

though he marries with

part of

the conscious world, he cannot himself attain it.

Second, Lydia Lensky's rebirth takes the form of

repudiation of her former, conscious life.

Lydia is "re-

lieved" at the death of her intellectual husband, and she

slowly establishes
a

primal connection with rural England,

gave way" (R 47).

as her "automatic consciousness

Lydia

's

"instinct" takes over command of her self, denying her

former and consciously mental existence:

After she had been with him in the Marsh kitchen, the voice of her body had risen strong and insistent.
.

She got to know him better, and her instinct fixed on him -- just on him. Her impulse was strong against him, beBut cause he was not of her own sort. one blind instinct led her, to take She felt the rooted safety him. of him, and the life in him (R 50)
.

UTien

her first son is born, Lydia gives over her old, out"She seemed to lose connection with her former

side life;
self.
(R 77).

She became now really English, really Mrs.

Brangwen"

By the time her second son is born, Lydia "scarcely

80

noticed the outer things at all" (R 97)

If the marriage

of Tom and Lydia satisfies some of the longing in the

former for the "outside world," Lydia herself is rejuve-

nated by "the teeming life of creation" of the "inner

world."
She finds "a new being,
a

new form" in order to

respond to the "blind insistence" of Brangwen (R 34-35).

Lydia establishes
a

connection with the 'impersonal forces'

that drive the flowers and also drive her:

The warmth flowed through her, she felt herself opening, unfolding, asking, as a flower opens in full request under the sun, as the beaks of tiny birds open flat to receive, to receive. And unfolded she turned to him, straight to him. And he came, slowly afraid, held back by uncouth fear, and driven by a desire bigger than himself
(R 51). In fact,

Lydia now enters perhaps into

deeper conIn a richly

nection with the Marsh Farm than her husband.

proleptic episode, Tom is "roused to chaos" by his inability to understand Lydia'

of dormancy.
s

sexual desires and periods

He tries to assert his will over her, and in

doing so rejects her "otherness," and Lydia tells him,

"you take me like your cattle,

...

want you to know

Tom,

there is somebody there besides yourself" (R 89).

then, is not only provincial in his inability to understand

the outer v;orld of the continent, Poland, or international

intrigue; he is also too provincial to decipher the cosmic

sexual forces at work in the world.
or even accept,
at first,

He cannot comprehend,

the rhythms and needs of Lydia'

body nor the natural and organic expressions of her commitment to him.
fie

is,

specifically, unable "to yield himself

naked out of

liis

own hands into the unknown power" (R 53)

that has all along driven him into this new and mysterious

relationship v/ith
as Tom has not,

mysterious Avoman.

Lydia has learned,

that (as Lawrence says in a letter), "it is

--

not your brain you must trust to, nor your will

but to

that fundamental pathetic faculty for receiving the hidden

;\raves

that come from, the depths of life.

It

is

some-

thing which happens below the consciousness."

Tom's final

reconciliation

iNfith

Lydia arises from his pure acceptance

He still does not know her foreign

of her otherness.

nature, nor does he understand her Polish past; but he is

no\\r

unconsciously aware of the sexual rhythms of her being:

"he knew her, he knew her meaning, without understanding"

(R 91)
,

and

tliis

unconscious acceptance leads to God:

Now He was declared to Brangwen and to Lydia Brangwen, as they stood together. 'rVTien at last they had joined hands, the house was finished, and the Lord took up his abode (R 92)

Throughout the novel,

ive

will observe increasingly conscious

characters achieving self-fulfillment only when they eventually return to the roots of being.
Lydia's daughter,
vsrith

Anna, must establish a dark connection of the flesh

her husband (R 233); and in the third generation, Ursula

must satisfy the "potent, dark stream of her

(R 449)

ov/n

blood"

in order to find wholeness of being.

The point is

82

that,

in tliis book where developing consciousness is the

theme, consciousness is not enough.

One may have

con-

scious awareness of the world, but one must have connection

with the cosmic forces which drive all life.

This is what

Lawrence means by being faithful to "the unfathomed moral

forces of nature":

Oedipus, Hamlet, Macbeth set themselves up against, or find themselves set up against, the unfathomed moral forces of nature, and out of this unfathomed force comes their death. Whereas Anna Karenina, Eustacia, Tess, Sue, and Jude find themselves up against the established system of human government and morality, they cannot detach themselves, and are brought down. Their real tragedy is that they are unfaithful to. the greater unwritten morality, which would have bidden Anna Karenina be patient and wait until she, by virtue of greater right, could take what she needed from society; would have bidden Vronsky detach himself from the system, become an individual, creating a new colony of morality with Anna; would have bidden Eustacia fight Clym for his o'a soul, and Tess take and claim her Angel, since she had the greater light; would liave bidden Jude and Sue endure for very honour's sake, since one must bide by the best that one has known, and not succumb to the lesser good (P 420)

Only by establishing contact witli the cosmic forces of

nature can one "becomio an individual."

Consciousness, on the other hand, is not primarily a

necessary condition for vmoleness of being, but

of man's developing nature.
The urge to know is
a

a
a

product

secondary

development in man, springing from

his primal connections with nature:

dissatisfaction with

83

Man is stirred into thought by dissatisfaction, or unsatisfaction as heat is born Consciousness is the same effort of friction. in male and female to obtain perfect frictionless interaction, perfect as Nirvana. It is the reflex both of male and female from defect in their dual motion (P^ 446).
,

Lawrence also explains in the Study the motivation and

function of consciousness, which is, as he puts it, a

lately developed habit of the human species which stems from the inevitable process of individuation:
The mind itself is one of life's laterTo know is a force, like developed habits. Knowledge is only one of any other force. the conditions of this force, as combustion To will is one of the conditions of heat. is only a manifestation of the same force, as expansion may be a manifestation of heat. And this knowing is now an inevitable habit of life's developed late; it is .a force active in the immediate rear of life, and the greater its activity, tlie greater the forward, unkno\vn movement ahead of it.
. .

Man's consciousness, that is, his mind, his knowledge, is his greater manifestation of individuality (P 431).
One of the themes
I

attempted to develop in Chapter

II

was

the mutual concern of Hardy and Lawrence for "Human develop-

ment in its richest diversity."

Here again we see Lawrence's

interest in the manner by which individuality develops.

The preceding quotations from the Study reveal that Law-

rence believed consciousness to be a signpost of man's

eternal development toward greater and more complete in-

dividuality.

In order to attain wholeness of being in the

modern world, then, man must find fulfillment in the mental

84

as well as the physical facet of the self.

is

The Rainbow

about this process of becoming conscious in an uncon-

scious land, about becoming an individual in the modern

world.

We must now turn to the second generation of the

,

still luiconscious

still "unsatisfied" Brangwen family, in

order to see what direction that process of becoming takes.

II

Anna Lensky is the daughter of Lydia and her Polish

husband.
at
a
tlie

She is only

small child when she comes to live

Marsh Farm, and is thus symbolically and literally

V/e

product of two worlds.

are already aware of many of

the attributes of those worlds by the time Anna becomes a

principal character about one-third of the way into the

novel, and this quality of character revelation, which

might be called repetition with variation, stems from the

organizing principle of the novel.

F.
R.

This principle, as
a

Leavis has pointed out, is a rhythmic one:

"move-

(^

ment that, by recurrence along with newness, brings con(

'^
j

J
{

tinually a significant recall of what has gone before."

The reader must continually refer to what he knows of Tom and Lydia in order to understand Anna.

'V

Anna is initially presented as

self-possessed, will-

ful child who clings to Lydia and is "detached" from Tom.

On the )iight Lydia gives birth to their first son, however,

Tom takes Anna into his world by initiating her into the

world of "blood-intimacv" of the farm.

As she watches her

85

stepfather feed the cows in the barn, the cliild is filled

V'/ith

wonder, and "a new being was created in her for the
.

new conditions" (R 74)

This rebirth into the v;orld of

a

Marsh Farm parallels Lydia's earlier creation of

"to meet the new conditions" of the "blind"

new self

(unconscious)

insistency of the rural world (R 34)

The first two years of Anna's life at the Marsh (when
she is seven and eight years old)

are related in Chapter

III, entitled "Childhood of Anna Lensky."

The girl does

not truly become a Brangwen, the title implies, until Tom

is able

to accept the conditions of Lydia's being,

iv'hen

and to

thereby make their marriage harmonious.

this arch of

marital stability is established, "the house is finished,"

the Lord takes up his abode, and the succeeding chapter is

entitled "Girlhood of Anna Brangwen."

Anna is

rather strange creature, distant, aloof and

proud, and she remains an "alien" in Cossethay and the

neighboring town of Ilkeston.

This strangeness is not ex-

plained, but is implicitly rendered as the result of her

dual nature as
a

transplanted l)2ing.

Anna "inherits" her

stepfather's fascination with "the outside world," which

she calls "the real world, where kings and lords and princes
m'oved and fulfilled their shining

lives" (R 95)

Her

mother's friend, an expatriated Pole named Baron Skrebensky,

becomes Anna's symbol of the conscious, outside world.
The

Baron is described as "the first person [Anna] met, who

86

affected her as

real, living person, whom she regarded

(R 94).

as having a definite existence"

(Years later,

Anna will contrast "the curious enveloping Brangwen intimacy" of the "uncritical, unironical" husband with the
sharp, detached objectivity of the Baron
[R

195-197]).

Anna is "cramped" (R 101) by the farm, and she soon falls

in love with her cousin-by-law, Will Brangwen, whom she

sees as a door to the outside world:

of her experience were transgressed:

"In him the bounds

he
vsras

the hole in

the wall, beyond which the sunshine blazed on an outside

world"(R 109).

Will inspires this hope of escape in Anna

primarily through his interest in architecture.

He was interested in churches, in church The influence of Ruskin had architecture. stimulated him to a pleasure in the medieval His talk was fragmentary, he was only forms. But listening to him, as he half articulate. spoke of church after church, of nave and chancel and transept, of rood-screen and font, of hatchet-carving and moulding and tracery, speaking always with close passion of particular things, particular places, there gathered in her heart a pregnant hush of churches, a mystery, a ponderous significance of bowed stone, a dim-coloured light through which something took place obscurely, passing a high, delighted framework into darkness: of the mystic screen, and beyond, in the It was a very furthest beyond, the alter. And She was carried away. real experience. the land seemed to be covered with a vast, mystic church, reserved in gloom, thrilled with an unknown Presence (B 108)

Anna's attempt to escape to the world represented by

Baron Skrebensky is, however,
a

failure.

In the quoted

paragraph above, we may find the seeds of this failure.

87

Will Brangwen is only "half -articulate" (R 108 and 109;

Tom, we remember, was "inarticulate"),

and "fragmentary";

later he is "vague," "unformed," and "subterranean."

Will's

interest in churches is primarily "mystical," and this un-

modern sentiment does not survive Anna's hard, rational

questioning, as the later "Cathedral" chapter emphasizes.
7

Furthermore, the imagery used to describe Will reveals him

as
a

basically unconscious being.

Like Anna, he is de-

scribed in literally dozens of references as an animal or

as

animal-like.

Anna is actually first attracted to Will

like Gertrude Morel,

by his animalistic physicality;

is

she

seized by "the running flame" (R 109) of her lover's

sensuous vitality

--by

the Female Principle.

Perhaps the

abundant animal imagery also prefigures the final, purely

sensual connection on which their marriage rests.
Will is also constantly described as "blind" or as
a

"blind animal," and Lawrence seems to mean by this word,

instinctual or unconscious.

Will's name is also signifia

cant here; he is described as "purely

and is unchangeable:

fixed will" (R 123),

"He felt he could not alter from what

To alter it he must

he was fixed upon, his will was set. be destroyed"

(R 122).

The central flaw in Will's charache has "knowledge

ter is identified by this static fixity:

and skill without vision."

Will is unable to convert ex-

perience into knowledge; he is unable to grow.

88

Anna, on the ot]ier hand, clings to her vision of "the

real world":
Slie was bitter against [her husband] that he let liis mind sleep.
. . .

She, almost against herself, clung to the worship of the human knowledge. Man must die in the body, but in his knowledge he was immortal. She believed in the omnipotence of the human mind (R 169)
.

Anna is ultimately forced to submit, however, to Will's

"corrosion" (R 177, and 178):
of sensual lust,
(R 205)
.

she accepts a "dark union"

and retires into a "sleep of motherhood"

(R 353)
,

Anna remains "undeveloped"

and she

relinquishes her. vision of a greater v/orld and becomes "a breeding animal" (R 353)
:

She faced the close of the affair, in which she had not played her fullest

part.

With satisfaction she relinquished the adventure to the unknown. She was bearing her children.
. . .

If she were not the wayfarer to the unknov;n, if she were arrived now, settled in

her builded house, a rich woman, still her doors opened under the arch of the rainbow, her threshold reflected the passing of the sun and the moon, the great travellers, her house was full of the echo of journeying.
She v;as a door and a threshold, she herself. Through her another soul was coming, to stand upon her as upon the threshold, looking out, shading its eyes for the direction to take (R 193)

The m.arriage of V/ill and Anna is not a failure.

If

the disappointment of this second generation seems greater

89

than that of the first, it is because the expectations and

aspirations of the younger couple are also greater.

does live "beyond her parents"
(R

Anna
one

126)

in Cossethay,

step nearer the city from the farm.

And V/ill does, at last,

develop "a real purposive self" (R 235) in his dark union

with Anna.

(Like her mother, Anna "gives

[her husband]

to

himself" [R 187].)

When a night school and handicraft

classes are started in the town. Will finds it "supremely

desirable" that he himself should teach carpentry and woodcarving to the village boys:
to take a real interest

"For the first time, he began

(R 235)
.

in a public affair"

This

new-found interest in the affairs of the community, which

Lawrence later says in "Apropos of Lady Chatterley's Lover "
is

an essential part of man's being, eventually leads Will

and his family to Beldover, as "Will Brangwen must become

modern" (R 421)

The Brang\\fen family was "in connection

with the great human endeavor at last" (R 236)

Ill

Tom Brangwen

's

granddaughter, Ursula, is the focal

.

point of the last half of The Rainbow

As is consistent

with the structure of the novel, Ursula's cliildhood experiences and conflicts echo (almost, at times, to the
point of monotony) those of her mother's childhood.

^_^

These early experiences, however, do not shape Ursula's

character so much as does the very fact that she is of the

third generation,
--

that the time and family now for

90

reasons unknown seem ripe for full development.

to her grandmotlier talk of the past,

Listening

of Poland and her

coming to Marsli Farm, Ursula feels

tiny arising from the past:
and
slie

sense of personal des-

"Strange, her antecedents were,

felt fate on cither side of the terrible" (R 257).

a

Ursula is filled with

strong sense of the past (R 258)

(R 262)
,

and of her unusual family heritage

and at an

early age
felt:

siie

too feels the confinements her mother had

Even as a girl of twelve she was glad to burst the narrow bound of Cossethay, wliere Outside, was all only limited people lived. vastness, and a throng of real, proud people whom slie would love (R 262)
.

In an emblematic scene three quarters through the novel,

Ursula is confronted by two vistas which seem to represent

her alternative routes toward self -fulfillment
.

Ursula and

her "first love," Baron Skrebensky's son, Anton, are taking

a

stroll through Marsh Farm:

The blue way of the canal wound softly between the autumn hedges, on towards the On the left greenness of a small hill. was the whole black agitation of colliery and railway and the town which rose on its The hill, the church tower topping all. round white dot of the clock on the tOAver was distinct in the evening light.

That way, Ursula felt, was the way to London, through the grim, alluring seeth of On the other hand was tlie evening, the town. mellow over the green water-meadows and the winding alder trees beside the river, and There the pale stretches of stubble beyond. the evening glowed softly, and even a peewit vv'as flapping in solitude and peace.

91

Ursula and Anton Skrebensky walked along the ridge of the canal between (R 307)
Mere again we see the "blood- Intimacy" of the rural, "inner

world" contrasted with the outer world of "kings and princes" or "real, proud people."
the Marsh Farm vs.

The country vs.

the city,

London, and the machine in the garden:

these have been the central conflicts of the novel from the

first pages, and they are by now quite familiar.

The thing that makes Ursula the central character in
this novel, however,
is

not that she gains greater under-

standing of both sides of this conflict than any of her ancestors (although she does)
,

but that she ultimately re-

jects either of them as viable alternatives.

Neither the

one nor the other will do as paths to wholeness of being.

Ursula's rejection of the unconscious, blood-prescient

nature of the Marsh is dramatized by
lier

refusal to marry

Anthony Schofield.

Anthony,

brother of one of Ursula's

fellow- teachers at the St. Philip's Church School, is a

man in the Walter Morel -Tom Brangwen mode.

He is a gardener

with "the eyes of

as
a

satyr" (R 413)

and he is characterized

lusty, passionate animal a dozen times in the four

pages which deal with him.

Most poignantly, Anthony is

,

"like an animal moving in its unawareness

"

and although

Ursula sees the Schofield farm as "the Garden of Eden,"

she knows she cannot accept the proposal of this unconscious,

albeit physically attractive, farmer:

92

She turned away, she turned round from him, and saw the east flushed strangely rose, the moon coming yellow and lovely upon a rosy sky, All this so above the darkening bluish snov/. lie did not beautiful, all this so lovely! But she saw it, see it. He was one with it. and was one with it. Her seeing separated them infinitely.

They went on in silence down the path, following their different fates (R 417)
.

Somehow, from her heredity and

lier

education, Ursula has

tlie

become

separate, distinct, conscious being, and

m.ind has

development of her

opened an unbridgeable gap be-

tween herself and men like Anthony, or like her grandfather:

"She was a traveller on the face of the earth,

and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfillment

of his own senses"
(R 417). It is

necessary to note,

however, that in this journey (which Anna had relinquished),

Ursula's consciousness does not prohibit her from establishing

a

connection with the natural world:

"she was one

with it" also.

The added dimension of consciousness in-

creases rather than diminishes the quality of the connec^.-

tion.

12

-^.

Neither is the other apparent alternative, "the way

to London" and the outside world,

acceptable to Ursula.
is

This route toward finding her "maximum self" (R 301)

finally rejected in Ursula's refusal to marry Anton

Skrebensky, but this rejection begins with her response

tc the

industrial horrors of Wiggiston.

The "way to Lon-

don," as the symbolic landscape makes obvious, is "through

93

the grim, alluring seetlie of the town

tlie

whole black

agitation of colliery and railway," and at V/iggiston Ursula

decides that "her soul's action should be the smashing of
the great machine" (R 349).

Ursula's Uncle Tom, the mana-

ger of the new collieries of Wiggiston, becomes an emblem

of evil for Ursula.

He is evil not merely because he is

associated with the dehumanizing effect of industrialism,

but because he capitulates to it:
"his only happy moments,
v;as

his only moments of pure freedom were v;hen he

the machine"
(R 349)
.

serving

The Wiggiston episode clearly points

out that it is not the machine itself that is evil, but

man's attitude toward the machine that reduces him to the

level of an animal.
The evil of "the industrial horror"

arises from man's identification of himself with the machine,

and the subordination of his life to it.

Tom tells Ursula

of his house-servant's late husband, a collier who has "died

very gradually," and very young:

We "Her husband was John Smith, loader. reckoned him as a loader, he reckoned himself as a loader, and so she knew he represented his job. Marriage and home is a little sideshow" (R 347) .13

Ursula's uncle sees men as small machines controlled by the

pit, which takes all of the man "that really matters."

Winifred, Tom's wife-to-be, agrees:

It is the "It is the same everywhere. office, or the shop, or the business that gets the m.an, the woman gets the bit the What is he at home, a shop can't digest. man? He is a meaningless lump --a standing machine, a machine out of work" (R 348).

94

These attitudes reduce Tom and Winifred, in Ursula's mind,

to reptiles,

"great prehistoric lizards," and gives them

(R 350)

an odor of places where "life and decaying are one"

The narrator takes up this animal imagery to describe the

marriage of Tom and Winifred:

Brangwen and Winifred Inger continued engaged for another term. Then they married. Brangwen had reached the age when he wanted Neither marHe wanted children. children. riage nor the domestic establishment meant He wanted to propagate anything to him. He He knew what he was doing. himself. had the instinct of a growing inertia, of a thing that chooses its place of rest in vsrhich to lapse into apathy, complete, proHe would let the machinfound indifference. ery carry him; husband, father, pit-manager, warm clay lifted through the recurrent action of day after day by the great machine from which it derived its motion. As for Winifred, she was an educated woman, and of the same She would make a good comsort as himself. She was his mate (R 351) panion.
The imagistic accusation is clear:

these products of the

mechanistic world come together only for propagation; they

are not husband and wife,

they are mates.

When man allows

the rhythm of the machine to replace the natural rhythms

of human life, he is reduced to the level of the mindless,

instinctual beast.
Ursula's futile attempt to find her maximum self, or
best self, in "a man's world" of work is also dramatized
by her experience as
a

school teacher.

She links her old,

rural life with the outside world when she boards the

tram-car bound for Ilkeston and enters into "her new

95

existence" (R 368).

But she finds this new world a prison

The school is "evil," "un-

peopled by the dead (R 372).

real," and "timeless," and its pupils are "a collective,

inhuman thing" (R 376).

a

Like the colliery, the school is

tlie

reductive machine whose task is to reduce

to "one

children

to automatons,

state o mind, or being" (R 382).

Ursula adapts herself to survive in this world, but she

again has a vision of apparent alternatives:
She was struggling between two worlds, her own world of young summer and flowers, and And the glimmer of this other world of work. her own sunlight was between her and her class (R 408) The University at which Ursula becomes a student after two years as a grammar school teacher is still another negative experience for her.
A year of study breaks even this

illusion of the beau monde as a place to find one's best

self.

She begins to see even the halls of academe as a

tainted marketplace, in which the professors are "middlemen handling

V'/ares,"

and the classics classes are "a sort

of second-hand curio shop, where one bought curios and

learned the market-value of curios"

(R 434)

Once again,

disillusionment takes over Ursula's vision of the great modern world:

Gradually the perception stole into her. This was no religious retreat, no perception It was a little apprenticeof pure learning. shop where one was further equipped for making The college itself was a little, money. slovenly laboratory for the factory. It was a sham store, a sham vsrarehouse, with
.
. .

96

a single motive of material gain, and no productivity. It pretended to exist by the But the religious virtue o knowledge. religious virtue of knowledge was become a flunkey to the god of material success

(R 435) .14

It

is

evident that Ursula's disappointments in the

outer world represent the novel's insistence on the impossi-

bility of achieving one's maximum self through social institutions, or even through consciousness alone.
At this

stage of her life, just before she begins to sense what the

novel projects as the real center of being, Ursula's dis-

illusionment

is

complete:

She had the ash of disillusion gritting under Would the next move turn out the her teeth. Always the shining doorway ahead; and same? then, upon approach, always the shining doorway v/as a gate into another ugly yard.
.
.

Every hill-top was a little No matter! different, every valley was somehow new.
.

She But what did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? Only she was full did not know what she was. Always, always of rejection, of refusal. she was spitting out of her mouth the ash She could and grit of disillusion. only stiffen in rejection, in rejection. She seemed always negative in her actions. (R 436-437)
. .

Ursula is obviously not looking merely for

for
a

social role,
She is,

career, or oven for

manner of living.
--

rather, looking for a mode of being

as

of being herself --

if she were an unknov/n thing which was still not yet

formed.
is

"But what did

it^

mean, Ursula Brangwen?"

This

what Lawrence means by "another ego" in his fictional

97

characters, who are not bound by "a certain moral scheme."

The point is not that Lawrence's "new characters" are amoral

Ursula is as certainly
Brooke.

part of

social ethic as Dorothea

The roots of Ursula's individual being, however,

exist beyond either social ethic or personality;

is
a

Ursula

living, unique human being before she is

member of

any particular social order, and the "radiant gist" of vital

being transcends social structure and social development.

At this point in the novel, no doubt pressured into

insight by the disappointment of her hopes and the accumu-

lation of experience, Ursula begins to glimpse

third al-

ternative,

third path to self -fulfillment

The narrator

describes this process of apprehension:

That which she was, positively, was dark It and unrevealed, it. could not come forth. This world was like a seed buried in dry ash. in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp. This lighted area, lit up by man's completest consciousness she thought \\fas all the world: that here all was disclosed for ever. Yet all the time, within the darkness she had been ai'/are of points of light, like the eyes of A\fild beasts, gleaming, penetrating, And her soul had acknowledged in vanishing. a great heave of terror only the outer darkThis inner circle of light in which she ness. lived and moved, '.^herein the trains rushed and the factories ground out their machine -produce and the plants and the animals worked by the light of science and knowledge, suddenly it seemed like the area under an arc- lamp, wherein the moths and children played in the security of blinding light, not even knowing there was any darkness, because they stayed in the light.
,

But she could see the glimmer of dark movement just out of range, she saw the eyes of

98

the wild beast gleaming from the darkness, watching the vanity of the camp fire and the sleepers; she felt the strange, foolish vanity of the camp, which said "Beyond our light and our order there is nothing," turning their faces always inward towards the sinking fire of illuminating consciousness, which comprised sun and stars, and the Creator, and the System of Righteousness, ignoring always the vast darkness that wheeled round about, with halfrevealed shapes lurking on the edge.

Yea, and no man dared even throw a fireFor if he did he was brand into the darkness. jeered to death by the others, who cried "Fool, anti -social knave, why would you disturb us with bogeys? There i_s^ no darkness. We move and live and have our being within the light, and unto us is given the eternal light of knowledge, we comprise and comprehend the Fool innermost core and issue of knowledge. and knave, how dare you belittle us with the darkness?"

Nevertheless the darkness wheeled round about, with grey shadow-shapes of wild beasts, and also with dark shadow-shapes of the angels, light fenced out, as it fenced out the whom And the more familiar beasts of darkness. som.e, having for a moment seen the darkness, saw it bristling with the tufts of the hyena and the wolf; and some having given up their vanity of the light, having died in their own conceit, saw the gleam in the eyes of tlie wolf and the hyena, that it was the flash of the sword of angels, flashing at the door to come in, that the angels in the darkness were lordly and terrible and not to be denied, like the flash of fangs (R 437-438).
Ursula now gives up her "vanity of the light" and ceases
attempting to discover her maximum self through consciousness, "by the light of science and technology."
ly

A few

pages later, Ursula has

vision of the "special order of

life, and life alone" which is "to be oneself," and she

realizes simultaneously that she must find that self in

99

her love

fot-

Skrcbensky.

Again and again, we have seen

'

Lawrence proclaiming in his art that the

self
is

via media to the

love, and love alone,'

for only then is the self

fully exposed, and only then can it become fully realized

and fully known.
As Mark Spilka points out, when Skrebensky returns to

England after

few years of service in Africa,

"he seems

to possess the darkness of that continent in his blood."

In her sensual

affair with Anton, Ursula becomes generic

"Woman" (R 444), as her mother had once been (R 205), and

she comes to understand "the wave which cannot halt" that

her ancestors had known unconsciously:

She could see, beneath their .pale, wooden pretence of composure and civic purposefulness the daij^c st ream which contained them all. They"were like little paper ships in their motion. But in reality each one was a dark, blind, eager v\rave urging blindly forward, dark with the same homogeneous desire (R 448)

Ursula becomes

conscious being who has rediscovered her

The real,

roots, which are the roots of being for all life.

"im.personal" .self is not the self identified by social

roles, by personality, or by "a certain moral order"; it

is

"anotner, stronger self that knows the darkness" [R 452)

that shares the primal, cosmic spark of life which vitalizes

every living thing.

Thus Ursula connects the old world with

the new, and finds her maximum self by combining the con-

scious, urban \vorld of London and the University with the

rural, unconscious "blood-intimacy" of the farm.
The novel

100

invites us, at least, to see Ursula as this kind of bridge-

builder, encompassing as well as extending the Brangwen

line
She began to think she was really quite of the whole universe, of the old world as well as of the new. She forgot she was outside the pale of the old world. She thought she had brought it under the spell of her own, real world. And so she had (R 455)
.

IV
In the last cliapter of Jude the Obscure
,

crowd of

people

v.'ho

have gathered to view the Remembrance Day celea

brations recognize the newly returned Jude Fawley,

stone-

cutter who, they remember, once aspired to academic honors

at Christminster
.

One of the responses Jude makes to their

queries as to why he has not "done any great things" is

that "'It takes two or three generations to do what
to do in one
.
.

tried

.'"

(J 366).

Hardy had voiced this same

sentiment seventeen years earlier in The Return of the

Native

in which the narrator says,

"In passing from the

bucolic to the intellectual life the intermediate stages

are usually two at least,

frequently many more; and one of

19

these stages is almost sure to be worldly advance."

Lawrence renders his novel of

family passing from

the bucolic to the intellectual life in three generations,

and whether this design (which includes Will Brangwen's

"worldly advance") is based on fact, on personal observation or on Hardy

I

do not know.

It does

appear,

101

nevertheless, that Lawrence has based at least part of

Ills

novel on The Return of the Native

specifically,

Eustacia Vye and Clym Yeobright seem to be points of departure for the characters of Ursula and vXnton.

Certainly

Ursula, for example, shows traits apparently inherited from

her parents and grandparents, but as an individual character she seems much closer to Lawrence's view of Eustacia
as he describes her in the Study of Thomas Hardy
.

LaAvrence sees Eustacia as a "dark passionate" charac-

ter seeking her best self.

What she wants, says Lawrence,

"is evidently some form of self-realization; she wants to

be herself, to attain herself" (P 414)

But Eustacia does

a

not know how to go about this, so she creates

vision of

"Paris and the beau monde " as the high road to the self.

Lawrence says, "If Paris real had been Paris as she imagined it, no doubt she was right and her instinct was soundly expressed."

Like Jude

'

Eustacia

'

idealization of

way to the self is unreal:

cia'
s

"But Paris real was not Eusta-

imagined Paris.

Where was her imagined Paris, the

place where her powerful nature could come to blossom?

Beside some strong-passioned, unconfined man
.
.
.

which

Clym might have been" (P 416)

Like Eustacia, Ursula dreams of finding self - fulfillment
in the beau monde,

and is disappointed.

She, too,

is

final-

ly compelled to turn to a lover to find a xvay to

her ideal-

istic image of what "the good life" would be.

Hardy's

102

heroine is, o course, only

starting,'

point for Lawrence.

,

Lawrence takes Ursula right into the hcau monde

to Paris, to show that "Paris real was not

and even

[her]

imagined

Paris."

The disappointments of hope in the world of work

lead Ursula to "the bitterness of ecstacy" in love, drama-

tizing what Lawrence sees as the central Hardian theme:

that "the via media to being is love, and love alone."
The most significant difference between the two women is

that while Eustacia is thwarted by Clym in her search for

her self, Ursula is able to overcome Skrebensky's shortcomings

.

Both Clym and Skrebensky represent apparent doorways

to freedom for their women, and both fail their women in

similar ways.

Both men are, as Lawrence says of Clym,

[and]

"impotent to be,

must transform himself, and live

in an abstraction,

in a generalization, he must identify

himself with the system.

He must live as Man or Humanity,

or as the Community, or as Society, or as Civilization"

(P 416).

Clym and Skrebensky fail to acknowledge or appre

ciate the uniqueness of the individual.

Ursula's criti-

cisms of Skrebensky echo Lawrence's analysis of Clym.

"What do you fight for, really?"

she asks him early in

their courtship:
"I

would fight for the nation."

"For all that, you aren't the nation, l^at would you do for yourself?"
"I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation."

103

"It seems to me," Ursula says finally in exasperation,

"as i you v;cren't anybody.
.

You seem like nothing

to me" (R 309)

Later the narrator of The Rainbow gives the reader

full-scale examination and condemnation of Skrebensky's

values.
"What did a man matter personally?" thinks Anton.

"He was just a brick in the whole great social fabric,

the nation, the modern humanity.
. .
.

One had to fill

one's place in the wjiole, the great scheme of man's elaborate civilization, that was all.

The whole mattered --

but the unit, the person, had no importance, except as he

represented the

IVliole"

(R 326).

We are reminded here,

perhaps, of Clym's disastrous plan to provide the rustics

of Egdon Heath with culture:
"He wished," says the nar-

rator,

"to raise the class at the expense of individuals

IVliat

rather than individuals at the expense of class.

was

more, he was ready at once to be the first unit sacrificed."

Both of these attitudes follow metaphysically in the Utili-

tarian tradition and are rejected by the statements and

events in the novels.
The narrator of The Rainbow is quite

explicit about this:

No highest good of the community, however, would give him the vital fulfilment of his soul. He knew this. But he did not consider the soul of the individual sufficiently important. He believed a man was important in so far as he represented all humanity.
He could not see, it was not born in him to see, that the highest good of the community as it stands is no longer the highest

104

He good of even the average individual. thought that, because the community represents millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more important than any individual, forgetting that the community is an abstraction from the many, and is not the many themselves. Now when the statement of the abstract good for the community has become a formula lacking in all inspiration or value to the average intelligence, then the "common good" becomes a general nuisance, representing the vulgar, conservative materialism at a low level (R 327). 20

Skrebensky fails Ursula because he fails to establish

lasting self beyond his social self; he remains, finally,

content with being
a

role-player,

creature

v\^holly

defined

by his habits, an "arrangement of forged metal" (R 443).

Like Will Brangwen, Anton ultimately fails to open out into
the unknown; both men exist "known" and possessed by their

women.

Like Gerald Critch of Lawrence's next novel,

Skrebensky fails to find self -fulfillment in either his

social roles or in the consummation of love, and at the
end longs only for death (R 479)
.

Ursula, on the other hand, is like Paul Morel in that

she achieves self -fulfillment through "the process of

coming-into-being on the high road of love and of its unfolding in relation to the greater life of nature."
21

Law-

rence adapts his own characters as well as those of Hardy

to his purposes in The Rainbow
.

If Eustacia Vye is

partial prototype for Ursula, Paul Morel's quest to create

a

best self is of equal importance,

Ursula is reborn in

her love-making with Skrebensky just as Paul was with Clara,

105

and botli are reintroduced to the primal, cosmic, Edenic

forces of all life by this experience (R 451 and

SI^

354)

The characters of Gertrude and Walter Morel, and perhaps

even of Will Morel, also appear in this novel, in which the

form of Lawrence's art, but not the content,
is

changed.

V
I

Prompted by Lawrence's letter to Garnett concerning

"another ego" according to whose action the individual is

unrecognizable,
ley to M.
L.

great number of critics, froiaAldous Hux

Raina, have concluded that there are nQ_disI

tinctions to be made between Lawrence's characters.

feel, contrariwise, that Ursula is quite distinct from her

mother simply by virtue of the fact that Ursula develops a

v/hole complex of responses

to the world that her mother does

not.

If Anna may be compared with Arabella Bonn, Ursula

a

might be seen as
Bridehead.

subtle combination of Arabella and Sue

,

For at the end of The Rainbov^/

Ursula has

achieved

unique integration of body and mind, an integra-

tion her mother had barely glimpsed.

To be connected to another, by blood or place or even

sensibility, does not demand that one be 'indistinct from'

or

'identical with' another.

a

It is the case that Lawrence

tlie

writes about

different part of

human being than, say,

Jane Austen writes about.

He spends a good deal of time

in The Rai nbow talking about the connection (or lack of con-

nection) people have

v\'ith

the roots of all living things,

106

with the forces that drive the flower; but he is also constantly concerned with
inorganic things
and demands.
-tlie

individual's confrontation with

with social attitudes and institutions

a

Each major character appears against

back-

ground of changing time, of great social and economic upheaval, and that change cannot take place without
a

corres-

ponding change in the cliaracters.

in most,

In this novel, more than

environment shapes character at least as strongly

Lawrence's repeatedly proclaimed belief in

A^

as heredity.

the uniqueness of each individual is never really in danger

in The Rainbow

i,

His interest in the roots of being, which

is

lie below and beyond the socially determined self,

the

key, of course, to the originality of the novel.

But what

Lawrence is trying to show is not that all men are alike,

but that all men have the potential for achieving wholeness
of being if they would but look for that unity of self in
the thing which makes them men, and which makes them in-

dividual:

man experiences "the primal impulses of life"

and in the consummation of this ex-

in love and sexuality,

perience alone can man find his true, vital self.

"to be oneself [is]
(R 441)
a

Finally,

supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity"

Ursula arrives at "the bottom of all things"

and,

(R 490)

like Paul Morel, finds herself alone.

She waits on

the shore of "the Nev; IVorld" for the coming man:

"The man
him''

should come from the Infinite and she should hail

107

(R 493).

In Lawrence's next novel,

the coming man comes

and the community of the new world is established.

" ,

NOTES

CHAPTER III

p.

1\
2

The Ra inbow (New York: Viking Compass Edition, hereafter cited in text as R.

1961),

Appropriately, Anna Lensky sees Tom as embracing "all manhood" (R 102)

7

This connection is, in many ways, a familiar landmark In the Prologue to The Myth of the of cognitive change. Machine (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), Lewis Munford outlines a view of the machine as a catalyst to individual consciousness, and "the shaping of a new This self -transformation not merely rescued self. man from permanent fixation in his original animal condition, but freed his best developed organ, his brain, for other tasks than those of ensuring physical survival. The dominant human trait, central to all other traits, is this capacity for conscious, purposeful self -identification, self-transformation, and ultimately for self -understanding. As early as 1829, Carlyle wrote in "Signs of the Times": "Not the external and physical alone is now managed by For machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling." One of the positive effects of 'Mechanism,' he goes on later, is in the "Knowledge, education are openadvancement of learning: ing the eyes of the humblest; are increasing the number of
.
. . . .

thinking minds without limit."

'^New

York: Norton Critical Edition, 1969, p.

,

1.

Letters
D.

ed.

Moore, p. 326.

1956),
n

H. Lawrence: p. 122.

Novelist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

The Cathedral chapter is a symbolic elaboration of the contrasts imminent in the characters of Will and Anna. For the best discussion of this episode, see Kinkead-Weekes pp. 386-90, and Yudhistar, pp. 136-38.

108

109

The many references to Will and Tom Brangwen as "blind" give credence to this sense of the word, as does the description of the young orderly in "The Prussian Offi"It was not that the youth was clumsy: cer": it was rather the blind, instinctive surencss of movement of an unhampered young animal. ..." Another Lawrence short story, "The Blind Man," is about a man reduced to purely physical and instinctual existence. See Nancy Abolin, "Lawrence's 'The Blind Man': The Reality of Touch," A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany ed. Harry T. Moore (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959), pp. 215-20.
,

"There was no tenderness, no love between them any more, only the maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant gratification in the sensual beauties of her body" (R 233)
For a detailed discussion of this childhood see Yudhistar, pp. 140-60; also Edward Engelburg, "Lawrence's The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman," PMLA 78 (1963), 103-13.
,

The momentary attraction between Ursula and Anthony replay of the initial attraction of Gertrude and Walter Morel. Gertrude "loved ideas, and was considered very intellectual. What she liked most of all was an argiiment Ursula on religion or philosophy or politics" (SL^ 9) "knew she could move [the Schofield men] almost at will with her light laughter and chatter. They loved her ideas, watched her as she talked vehemently about politics or economics" (R 413)
is
a
.

This is an aspect of Lawrence's thought that students the mind is only and critics often fail to understand: evil in Lawrence when one subordinates one's whole being to knowing In fact, the integral incorporation of knovs'ing with feeling is necessary to the continuing process of individuation (cf. P 431).
.

12

Although the theme of the dehumanization of man consequent to his capitulation to the machine is a continuing one in Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, it was initially a Germanic one. As early as 1795, in his Letters upon the Aesthetical Education of Man Fredrich Schiller describes the "degeneration" of contemporary culture through the "Man having im.age of a "complicated machine": nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound of the pernever develops the harmony petually revolving wheel, of his being; and instead of imprinting the seal of humanity on his being, he ends by being nothing more than the
,
. . .
.

13

110

living impress of the craft to which he devotes himself ." ("Letter VI," Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical [London: n.p., 1910], p. 37).
.
.

Cf. Sue Bridehead's quite similar remarks about the university at Christminster

'Intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The mediaevalism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go.

...

'It is an ignorant place, except as to They see life as it the townspeople. is, of course; but few of the people in the
.
.

colleges do.

'At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other' (J III, iv)

See Chapter I, pt. II, of this study for the text of the letter in which Lawrence describes his 'new' characters.
Cf.
p.

Lawrence's short poem, "Escape"

Complete Poems

482):

When we get out of the glass bottles of our own ego, and when we escape like squirrels from turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.
The novel seems a bit confused at this point, as Ursula's vision occurs with the aid of a microscope (cf. "the light of science and knowledge," by which truth cannot be found [R 437]), and that vision reveals goals she already knows (cf. R 301) and means she has already tried (cf. R 356). The point which probably needs emphasis here, ho\\?ever, is that now, due to her ability to learn from her
17

Ill

experience and frequent disappointments (as her father, Cor example, could not), Ursula will be able to achieve the goals she heretofore had only glimpsed.
The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (Bloomington: University Press, 1955), p. 113.
""^Book III,
20
1

Indiana

chap.

ii.

Cf. Carlyle's quite similar remarks on machineoriented utilitarianism, in "Signs of the Times":

We figure Society as a 'Machine,' and that mind is opposed to mind, as body is to body; whereby two, or at most ten little minds must be stronger than one great mind. Notable absurdity! For the plain truth, very plain, we think is that minds are opposed to minds in quite a different way; and one man that has a higher Wisdom, a hitherto unknown spiritual Truth in him, is stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than ten thousand, but than all men that have it not.
, .
. .

21

Hochman, p. 30.
:
|

See Huxley's introduction to Letters "Most of us are more interested in diamonds and coal than in undifferentiated carbon"; also see Vivas, p. 202: "In essence, we cannot differentiate them [the characters of The Rainbov; ] at all"; Catvitch, p. 40: "The outlines of their identities ."; Moynahan, p. 41: are left dim "[What Lawrence proposes is to] make it impossible to distinguish one character from another"; Daleski, p. 75: "Lawrence deals with three generations in order to discover what is constant in the lives of men and women"; Ford, p. 140: Lawrence is primarily interested in "the area in which all of us are approximately identical"; and M. L. Raini, "An Approach to The Rainbov; ," The Literary Criterion (Summer 1970), 9 45: "The individual characters lose their distinct iden." tity.
.
.

I am basically in agreement with 144-45, and Yudhishtar ,p 115-17.

.

23

P.

R.

Leavis, pp.

CHAPTER IV
WORLD'S END:
THE CFIARACTERS OF WOMEN IN LOVE

It is the Character is a curious thing. flame of a man, which burns brighter or dimnrcr, bluer or yellower or redder, rising or sinking or flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and tlie changing air of life J- changing itself c"onl:inually, yet remaining one single, separate flame, unless it flickering in a strange v;orld: be blovm out at last by too much adversity. Lawrence, "The Novel"

"In a world so anxious for outside tidiness," Lawrence

v/rote

to one of his
I

reviewers, "the critics will tidy me

IVhoever reads mc will be in the
--

up, so

needn't bother.

thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it

if he

wants a safe seat in the audience

else.''

--

let him read somebody

This fearful warning from the author of Women in

v/hich Lawrence called "a potential sequel

Love

to The Rain

bow

,"

rightly advises the reader and scholar to approach

v^rith

this novel

great caution.

Though it was finished in

early 1917, the prosecution and suppression of The Rainbow

delayed the publication of Women in Love until 1920.

The Rainbow, the new novel is, as Lawrence says in the

Like

"Forev/ord," about "the passionate struggle into conscious

being."

The Foreword goes on to articulate the essential

conflict of the novel:

112

113

Every We are now in a period o crisis. man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul. The people that can bring forth the new passion, the new idea, this Those others, that fix people will endure. themselves in the old idea, will perish vsrith the new life strangled unborn within them. Men must speak out to one another.

Women in Love
Days
is
(2

which was almost entitled The Latter

Timothy 3:1) and Days of Wrath (Revelation 6:17),

a

itself

drama of crises in which four principal charac--.-^

ters act out in a quite limited number of scenes the principles and centers of meaning which create the direction of

their lives.

Each meeting and interaction between the

a

main characters seems to have

ring of inevitability and

finality about it, as if every word and gesture, every act

and every response have taken on
a

crucial importance which

will determine not only the fate of the characters but also
that of the very society in which and even the planet on

which they live.

kairos
,

Each moment in the novel is one of

moment of "critical time" singled out by its^.

a

participation in

pattern of highly symbolic activity.'

The novel seems to work primarily on the premise voiced by

its protagonist,

Rupert Birkin,

v/ho

thinks that "there is

no such thing as pure accident," and that "everything that

happens [has]

universal significance" (WL 20).

The fig-

ures in this drama of crises are situated between an obsolete past and a catastrophic future of
a

world without

human life

(WL,

120, 444)."

Rupert Birkin's vision of "a

new kind of community"in which one can be "really happy with

114

some few other people

(

--

little frcedoni witli people" only suggested exit from the

WL 355)

is

certainly

tlie

dark rivers of corruption and dissolution v;hich contain us

all.

Unfortunately, that new world does not seem to be

forthcoming by the end of the novel, and one suspects Ursula is riglit when she tells Rupert, "You must learn to be

alone" (WL 355).

it,

The novel

is,

as

Raymond Williams puts

a

about "the experience of loss:

loss of what,
tlie

in

writing,

[Lawrence] himself had found --

experience of

community, of the irreducible reality of himself and other

human beings.
it enacts

Women in

L ove

is

masterpiece of loss, and

this loss in itself.""^

In this

strange combination of nove.l-of -ideas

pro-

phetic book,

and apocalyptic drama, character is all:

is^

character interaction

the plot, and the characters em-

body the structural and metaphysical poles of the novel.

Lawrence's people are not simply voices, hov/ever, like the

two-dimensional beings of Aldous Huxley's Point Counter

Point
.

In

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, Rupert Birkin, and

\

especially in Gerald Critch,

^.'xence

created the most

intriguing characters of his fiction, with the possible

exception of

Mr.?.

Morel.

But before we examine the indi,

vidual characters of Women in Love

let us look at two

problems which concern them all:

the meaning of experience.

the problem of myth, and

115

II

Al^iis^ipn to

mythical analogs as

method of chai-.acter

revelation is

conventional technique, but in Women in Love

The question is,
;

the uses of myth are highly ambivalent.

what is the function of myth in Women in Love

or more pre-

cisely, what is the function of the half -submerged allusions to myth, the hints and scattered bits and pieces of

numerous myths which dot the novel?

This kind of question,

especially

I'/hen

directed toward such ceittral twentiethli^aste

century works as Ulysses or The

Land

has become a

standard one for literary investigation and criticism in

our age.
myth,'
The image of the modern artist
,

'in quest of

in search of an arclietypal

collective consciousness
liis

or mytlios or tradition out of wliich he can create

life

and art looms over the entire corpus of literature in this

century.
a

But the usual uses of myth in the art object,

a

as

structuring device,

spatializat ion of the past,

stan-

dard of ironic disjunction, and so on, do not seem to be

employed in W^omen in Love

In 1871,

Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Traged y of

modern, disinherited man clutching at the roots of the past:

Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote anWhat does our great historical tiquities. hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic. home, the mythic womb?^

116

Similarly, in

F antasia

oF the Unconscious

Lawrence ob-

serves that "the Myths begin to hypnotize us once again, our impulse towards our own scientific way of understanding

being almost spent."

Lawrence shares with many other

a

twentieth-century artists
continuity,^ and
a

deep sense of historical dis-

,.

^.^
I
!>')f^i

\-?

central problem, if not sheer impossi-

bility, for the characters of Women in Love is the task of

relating the past and the present.

image not of the past as irrelevant

The novel gives us an

(such as we see in the
,

"moderns" of Pope's Dunciad or Swift's Tale of a Tub )

but

it of the past as "obselete," as Ursula Brangwen describes

in the first pages of the novel

(WL 5)

A sense of loath-

ing and fear accompany Ursula's experience of the^modern

disease of discontinuity, but at the end of the novel her

polar opposites, Gudrun and Loerke, are revelling in the
sickness of historical chaos: They played with the past, and with the great figures of the past, a sort of little game of chess, or marionettes, all to please They had all the great men for themselves. their marionettes, and they two were the As for God of the show, working it all. the future, that they never mentioned except one laughed out some mocking dream of the destruction of the world by a ridiculous Apart catastrophe of man's invention. from these stories, they never talked of the They delighted most either in mockfuture. ing imaginations of destruction or in sentimental, fine marionette shows of the past
.
.

(WL

44)

hisIn this chaotic, perverted world the great figures of

tory are reduced to sentimentalized puppets in a shattered

117

past totally void o any objective reality or value.

The

remnants of myth scattered throughout the novel appear in

much the same denatured, discontinuous fashion.

at one time compared to the Egyptian scarab

Gudrun is
and
a

(WL 5),

later feels as though she were "Daphne turning into

ma-

chine"

(WL^

108)

pregnant updating of the classical Daphne

The Gudrun of the Germanic m.yths, who

who became a tree.

married the lords of autumn and winter and slew her first
husband, is identified by Gertrude Jobes as a Medusa-type.

Gudrun

Brangv\'en also

becomes "a vivid Medusa"

(IVL

440)

in

the frozen mountains of Tyrol, just before she "wills" the

death of Gerald.'

Like Daphne, Gudrun is pursued by an

a

Apollo-type, and Gerald is also

of Odin's wolves,"^
(WL 173),

Nordic god (WL 39-40), one

Cain
(WL^

Hermes

(WL 336),

20),

Loki

and Dionysus

(WL 94).

As these examples show, the allusions to myth in the

novel, as

method of character revelation, are quite variGerald is clearly presented

and yet is de-

ous and often contradictory.

as a rational, Apollonian industrialist,

scribed explicitly as Dionysus.

mytliic types
is not an

This disjunctive use of

isolated incident in the novel, as

my subsequent discussion of the individual characters will

show.
It
is

here that we must remain "in the thick of the

scrimmage," and must make no reductive attempt 'to clear

up Lawrence'

through critical analysis.

Lawrence's almost

chaotic use of Biythic allusion to describe characters has.

118

as

see it, two principal implications:

first, it pre-

sents a clear image of a society "clutching about at countless other cultures" (in addition to the Greek, Roman, Ger-

manic, and Christian myths, Lawrence also refers to the

Egyptian, Etruscan, and African mythologies).

a

This is not

world ordered and informed by the past, as Pope's Windsor

a

Forest is ordered by classical myth; it is

disassociated

and discontinuous world with remnants of old v/orld-orders

"shored against my ruin," as

says.

T.

S,

Eliot's Fisher King

Secondly, and perhaps consequently, there is no

the characters of this novel

"stable ego of personality":

are as complex and as various as the types they embody, even

while they are representatives of archetypal forces, and

Lawrence's ambivalent if not downright contradictory use of

myth allows us to see his characters from many angles, and

in all their richness.

Gerald

ij_

both Dionysus and Apollo,

I

and many other things; his complexity is,

suspect, Law-

rence's way of making characters into "people."

Further-

more, the mythic types which Geiald embodies represent uni-

versal psychic forces which operate (Lav;rer.ce would say)

in all things human.

Cv-i

These forces represent the "primal

impulses" (Ph 418) which underlie all forms of being, but Gerald is freed from the stereotype which accompanies iden-

tification with singular mythic types by the combination of

many.

Gerald is both symbolically and realistically lawless

and law-abiding, good and evil, immeasurably strong and

119

pathetically weak.

Lawrence's use of myth obliterates his

character's personality in order to reveal the conflicts

of the soul.

One of the most striking consequences of

view of the
I

individual as driven by inner psychic forces (such as

have discussed above, and throughout this study) is a radi-

cally new view of the meaning of experience.

No longer is

wisdom necessarily or even probably the fruit of experience

as it
v-zas

in Goethe's world and that of most nineteenthIn that century,

century novelists.

the idea of the mean-

ing of experience which was generally accepted was that of

the good man learning through experience how to adapt his

inner self "to the outer reality he faced, for the ultimate
goal was selfhood within society."
12

In the twentieth

century "the outer reality" is alm.ost universally held to

be quite secondary to and even dependent upon the inner

design of the individual self, which is

reality not

easily fitted to a "general idea of all mankind," as Goethe

would have

it.""^

The mysterious forces of the unconscious

a

popularized by Freud led many modern artists to

completely

different notion of the value and end of experience.

"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself,
is

the end" says Walter Pater in 1873; and even earlier, as

Thomas Mann observes, Schopenhauer had the idea that "pre-

cisely as in a dream it is our own will that unconsciously

120

appears as inexorable objective destiny, everything in it

proceeding out of ourselves and each of us being the secret

theatre-manager of our
ov/n

dreams, so also in reality

our fate may be the product of our inmost selves, of our

wills, and we are actually ourselves bringing about what

seems to be happening to us."

Women in Love operates on

previous thinkers which becomes
tieth century:

a
a

principle enunciated by

common-place in the twen-

the conception of truth as psychological

and subjective, or relative, and a notion of experience as

an end in itself which does not necessarily bring wisdom and

only possibly brings "unity of being" to those individuals

who som.ehow find an integrative psychic balance within

themselves.

There must be an approach toward balance, but,

in Fantas ia of the Unconscious
. ,

as Lawrence warns

"suffice
.
.

to say the equilibrium is never quite perfect.

is no such thing as

There
The

an actual norm, a living norm.

a

norm is merely an abstraction, not

reality."

Lawrence

l-i

continues in this context to describe "a theory of human

relativity," which denies the possibility of experience as

normative conditioning:
We either love too much, or impose our will too much, are too spiritual or too sensual. There is not and cannot be any actual norm of human conduct. All depends, first, on the unknown inward need within the very nuclear centers of the individual himself, and secondly on his circumstances. Some must be too spiritual, some must be too sensual. No man can be anymore than just himself, in genuine living relation to his surroundings 15
o."^.

^ffr^l4

...

121

The very nature of being prevents experience from providing

a

doorway to individual and social stability or health;

"true Unity of Being," as Yeats insisted, "is found emo-

tionally, instinctively

[and not]

intellectually,

critically, and through

multitude of deliberately chosen

in_

experiences."

One finds meaning

experience itself,
tlie

rather than by means of experience.

The creation of

self is more "a matter of the soul's own contriving," as

Mann puts it, than

result of external forces impinging

17

upon the individual.

With this view of the meaning of experience in mind,

v\?e

can well understand Ursula's fear of marriage, which

1)
.

might "likely be the end of experience" (WL

As we have

already seen in the third chapter of this study, Ursula's

vision of truth in The Rainbow ("Self was
the infinite")
is an emotional,
a

oneness with

instinctual epiphany

rather than a categorical imperative deduced from an intellectual perusal of experience.

In Women in Love
,

the non-

rational benefits of experience are even further emphasized

by the almost axiomatic inability of the characters to
alter their selves or destinies even in light of the m.ost

revealing experiences.

The case is almost too simply putT""'

Gerald and Gudrun are on the road to destruction, and are unable effectively to control their imminent fates; Birkin
and Ursula are likewise unable to control their own destl)

nies

but are somewhat luckier in their prospecr.

One can

122

do no other than fulfill one's own being,

and one is born

either who as

a
a

"bird of paradise" or

"flower of mud."

Gerald,

"soldier, explorer, and Napoleon of industry"

seems a model twentieth-century man, appears simply over-

whelmed by outrageous fortune which nonetheless stems from

his very physiology, and which neither his vast experience

nor his "superior knowledge" can combat.

In this novel,

then, not only are the "primal^^ impulses^

I,

imprisoned by the ego and the will (see my Chapter

IT

parts
*--,

and III)
,

as

they v;ere in the character of Clym Yeobright

(Ph 418)

the very will itself is imprisoned in the nature

of one's individual being.

One cannot will not to will,

nor be other than what one is; and if one is branded with
the curse of Cain as Gerald is, one is inevitably and in/

c^^
'

extricably doomed

--

because "there are no accidents."

a

The meaning of experience in V/omen in Love is

direct

result of Lawrence's aesthetic goal as

defined it in

Chapter

I:

to portray the

impersonal forces he saw operatbeings (part III).

By blinding

ing within and between

huraaii

his characters to their fate, Lawrence achieves an aesthetic

faithfulness "to the greater unwritten morality

...

of

unfathomed nature."

He thus avoids what he considers "the

weakness of modern tragedy":

the tendency of Tolstoi and

Hardy to pit their heroes against society, rather than

"God" or the eternal forces of nature.

Gerald Critch, for

example, is relatively unaffected by the moral code of his

123

community.

He is defeated by the primal impulses of being

which are locked into his self.

Gerald unconsciously

brings about his own demise, echoing and perhaps confirm

ing Rupert Birkin's idea that every murdered person has

been unconsciously seeking his own murderer

(WL^

27).

Finally, we must recognize that in Women in Love Law

rence has given up his ideal of man as
a

radically innocent
I

being, and with it his Pelagian view of salvation (which

discussed in the first chapter).

Women in Love repudiates

Lawrence's assertion in the Study of Thomas Hardy that each^

individual is capable of working out his own salvation, and
that "earthly life could be complete and nontragic."
j

'^

Lawrence seems to be warning his reader of this shift in

his view of man when he writes in the Forev;ord of the novel

that "the creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us.

These promptings are

A fate

our true fate, which is our business to fulfill.

dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance,

is a false

fate."

Lawrence's former rejection of the con-

cept of fate is clearly overridden in Gerald's identifica-

tion with Cain, v/hich constitutes a higlily important and

continuing motif in the novel.

Under the pressure of

aesthetic honesty, Lawrence is forced to admit that man is

not always in control of his own destiny, at least in so
far as he is not in control of the very physiological con-

struction of his own self.

One can be flawed and fated.

124

as Oedipus

and Macbeth were, and as Gerald is.

Both the
hira

Furies which pursue Gerald and the fate that awaits

are irrevocably identified by his involuntary act of kil-

ling his brother:

"Gerald was Cain

a

[because] every-

thing that happens has

universal significance.
(WL 20)
.

...
Even

It

all hung together in the deepest sense"

Rupert Birkin feels that Gerald is "fated, doomed, limited.

This strange sense of fatality in Gerald, as if he were

limited to one form of existence, one knowledge, one activity, a sort of fatal halfness
.
. .

always overcame Birkin

after their moments of passionate approach" (Kl 199).

This

revised notion of fate is

final denial of the ability of

experience to provide an exit from the "mere anarchy" of

this period of crisis which is the modern
Ill
v>forld.

Women in Love is concerned with the fate of four characters who clearly satisfy Lawrence's requirements for
the "aristocrat" discussed in Chapter
I.

Ursula, Gudrun,

Birkin and Gerald each have "a real, vital, potential self,"
and are free of the fear of social convention.

Gerald and

Gudrun also seem to have that "germ of death" Lawrence sees

in the aristocrats of Hardy's novels.

Each of these char-

acters is involved in the classic, and by new familiar,

Laurentian struggle: the struggle into being through the

medium of love.

In Lawrence's highly complex method of

describing this (for the most part) interior struggle lies

125

the supreme accomplishment and the great difficulty of the

novel; as Barbara Hardy says,

Lawrence is constantly aware of the sexuality of his characters, and this often means that he does not explain affinities and enmities, as earlier novelists explained them, but relies heavily on the rhetoric of sensation. It is not merely a matter of language, but Lawrence also one of movement and rhythm. may jump from mood to mood, or from intuition to intuition, giving no rational explanation, or transition but keeping the sense of vagueness and mystery often stubbornly present in life. 19

Although this mimetic "sense of vagueness and mystery" adds

immeasurably to the power of the novel, it also severely

limits what the critic can say discursively about it.

My

discussion of the characters, therefore, must be understood

in the context of their central inef fabil ity

Ursula Brangwen, first of all, is not quite the triumphant lass we left at the end of The Rainbow
is
.

Women in Love

only "a p otential sequel to The Rainbow ," and this remark

from the Fore\\rord shows that Lawrence is only continuing

her story as if Ursula had developed in such and such

way

in the three or four intervening years since her vision of

"the new world."

In fact,

Ursula seems to have forgotten

both that vision and the climatic moment of discovery at

the biology laboratory, when she shouts in great fulfillment

and recognition that "to be oneself

^sras

supreme, gleaming

triumph of infinity."

Ursula celebrates her vital individ-

uality from this moment in The Rai nbow until its end, but
in V/omen in Love she is willing to toss off carelessly this

126

old ideal of individuality at the faintest sound of love:

"She believed that love far surpassed the individual. [Birkin]

said the individual was more than love or than

For him, the bright,
a

any relationship.

single soul accepted

love as one of its conditions,

condition of its own equi(

librium.
It is

She believed that love was everything "

WL 258).

clear that while Birkin now represents the Laurentian

v/as

dogma of the primacy of the individual over love which

outlined in the Study of Thomas Hardy

Ursula has changed

.

her metaphysical position from that of The Rainbow

Law-

rence has created a structural polarity between Birkin and

Ursula by casting the latter in

feminine role:

possessive, traditionally
He must

"Man must render himself up to her.

be quaffed to the dregs by her.

Let him be her man utterly,

and she in return v;ould be his humble slave -- whether she

wanted it or not" (WL 258).

Ursula's name, which is the Norse counterpart of the
Roman goddess Diana,
"the great mother goddess of

Nature,"

reveals her symbolic position in the novel (as

"Syria Dea" [WL 238], the Earth Mother and all-consuming

goddess of love)
;

it

also reveals her psychic similarity

to plana Critch, who literally hugs a young man to death.

IVhen

she falls from the cabin roof of a launcli at the

a

waterparty,

young doctor follows to rescue her:

The bodies of the dead were not recovered Diana had her arms tight till towards dawn. round the neck of the young man, choking him.
"She killed him," said Gerald (WL 181).

127

Rupert Bii-kin attempts to avoid

similar strangulation by

Hermione and Ursula (WL 192; 247) by remaining free, an

individual above all.
He is specifically trying to escape

from the clutches of the "Magna Mater," and he knows that

Ursula wants to "worship him as

woman worships her own

infant, with a worship of perfect possession" (WL 192).

From the liberated, heroic young woman in The Rainbow

Ursula has been transmuted into

'type'

in Women in Lov e.

She is now quite simply a representative of the principle of Law,

as

defined in the Hardy study.

She is a product of

the Covenant of the Old Testament God (Law),

a

and as such is

physical, centripetal, sensual force metaphysically and

structurally opposed to the male principle of Love represented by Birkin.

Many readers would argue that Ursula

wears these symbolic cloaks well, that she is a quite be-

lievable and well-rounded character.

Even so,

do not

find this Ursula the dynamic, mysterious female she was in

T he Rain bow^.

Ursula now seems to serve simply as

foil to

Birkin's eschatological tirades:

she is not allowed to

become anything more than Birkin polarizes or argu.es her

into being. This later Ursula is
;

slimmed-down version of

the heroine of The Rainbovv

she is now a less complex chara

acter

v.'ho

is

typed paradigm of normality in

novel full

of unusual people.

Rupert Birkin is the judicative center of Women in

Love
.

A.S

in the middle section of Sons and Lovers,

the

128

evaluations o the protagonist and the narrator are rarely

distinguishable."

In most

instances, Birkin and the nar-

rator describe and judge characters in the same manner and

with similar conclusions.

cludes
tlie

For example, the narrator con"slie

opening description of llermione by saying,

a

had no natural sufficiency, there was

terrible void, a
A few

lack, a deficiency of being within her" (Wl 11).

pages later, Birkin angrily tells llermione, "you haven't

got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. no sensuality" (WL 35).
as hell,

You have

Later, Birkin's image of the city

which Gerald scoffs at, is echoed in the narrator's

tlie

description of

London streets as "hideous" (WL 54)

As these instances increase in number, we realize that

Birkin has the approval of our omniscient narrator, and

must be considered the moral or metaphysical center of the
novel.
It

often seems as if the entire novel is focused on

Birkin's imagination, for he (and he alone) sees each char-

acter in his total individual and symbolic dimension'.

Bir-

'-^f -'*

kin identifies the characters according to their mythical

and sexual type
(Cain, Syria Dea;

lover-mistress or husband-

wife)

and it is his sense of apocalyptic drama that the

novel seems to fulfill.

Birkin does not, however, simply occupy

"standard-

supplying role in the book," as

It.""

W.

W.

Robson would have

Birkin's views, even though they may be identified

as Lawrence's own through the evidence of the Hardy study.

129

are nevertheless submitted to a good deal of critical

scrutiny, convincing counter-argument, and even ridicule.

As Anais Nin says in D.
H.

Lawrence:

An Unprofessional
"v/ho

Study

Lawrence has also created the characters

.

answer

Birkin,
ics

and who put him in the wrong."

Most crit-

fail to recognize tliis fluidity in the character of

a

Birkin and in the novel as

whole.

Nothing has

final
We see

form in this novel, and certainly Birkin does not.

him throughout groping, questioning, hypothesizing and then restating his hypothesis.
In one crucial example of this continuing mood of un-

certainty lies the clear evidence that this book is not

simply
world.
a

novel about the virtues of marriage in the modern

Early in the novel, Birkin and Gerald are riding a

train to London, and Birkin asks Gerald what "the aim and

object" of his life is.

Unable to answer for himself,

Gerald asks the same question of Rupert, who says,

"It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman -- sort of ultimate marriage -- and there isn't anything

else.

."

"And you mean if there isn't the wom.an, there's nothing?" said Gerald.

"Pretty well that -- seeing there's no God" (WL 51)

This statement of Birkin's "aim and object" in life follows

closely upon the narrator's summary comment on the GeraldRupert relationship at the time of the wedding reception
at Shortlands:

"They had not the faintest belief in deep

relationship betv/een men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed

friendliness"

(W_L

28).

It

is

tluis

with a profound sense

of discovery that Birkin revises the aim of his life in

the chapter entitled "Man to Man," near the middle of the

book

Suddenly he saw himself confronted with another problem -- the problem of love and Of eternal conjunction between two men. course this was necessary -- it had been a necessity inside himself all his life -Of course to love a man purely and fully. he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it (WL 198).
Here, and throughout the rest of the novel, Birkin realizes
that,
for him at least,

"marriage is not enough."

He is

forced to confront this problem in its various guises:

he

himself finds "the hot narrow intimacy between man and

wife
. .

abhorrent" (Wh 191), but he is continually con-

fronted both with Ursula's disapproval (WL 355) and dis-

belief (WL 473) in his ability to establish an equally

"eternal union
'.s'ith

man," and with Gerald's almost helpBirkin rejects the entire

less refusal to be that man.

society of contemporary England

it as

primarily because he sees

"a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated

in private houses or private rooms,

always in couples, and

no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested

relationship admitted" (WL 191).

An "eternal union" with

Gerald, complementary to his union with Ursula, would provide Birkin with
a

way out of the despised insularity of

131

conventional marriage.
a

It

would also provide the basis of

"

new community, in which all men would die

(WL^

nationally

so that they can exist individually"

In England,

387).

and out of it, Birkin is trying to estab-

lish

new community based on love between individuals.

as he

As a prophet or priest,

is

called dozens of times in

As a man trying

the novel, Birkin is Lawrence's spokesman.

to locate and deal with his problems, however,

Birkin is an

effective if rather two-dimensional character.

In the preceding passage concerning Birkin's

revision

of his goals, it is evident that the conflicts which exist

between the characters in the novel correspond to the essential conflicts within each character.
In this manner the

obscure, inner conflicts of the self--are translated into

outer conflict; that is to say, the battle within the self

is

portrayed by the dramatic action of characters in conWe have just seen,

flict with each other.

for example,
a

Birkin's inner problem of his relationship with

man ob-

jectified and dramatized through his particular relationship with Gerald Critch.
The entire novel seems to be
a

series of dramatized philosophical problems or questions.

The pliilosophical problem here,
in the "Man to Man" chapter,
tv\?o

is "the problem of love and eternal conjunction betv\?een

men" (WL 198), as the narrator tells us, and the answer

arrived at is Birkin's proposal of blutbrijdershaft with

Gerald.
We might propose similar problems as the basis of

152

most of the chapters in the book:

in "Mino," for example,

the novel seems to be examining the primal,

'natural'

rela-

tionship between male and female by focusing on the activity

of two cats.

This method of literary creation, as we have

to propose a

seen, is really the central Laurentian way:

problem, and them try to work it out in terms of fictional

art.
We have seen Lawrence's attempt to answer or correct

or rew rite Hardy's characters and Hardy's themes; we have

heard him scold Tolstoi, Joyce, Proust and Mann for a variety of sins, and we have heard him propose antidotes for
the shortcomings of their art.
In

this novel, once again,

we find Lawrence writing fiction around his own critical

antidotes.

In the Hardy study,

Lawrence, criticizes Anna

Karenina for the same faults he sees in Hardy.

of Hardy's heroines, he asks:

Of Anna, as

what was there in their position that was necessarily tragic? Necessarily painful it was, but they were not at war with God Yet they were cowed by only with Society. the mere judgment of man upon them, and all the while by their own souls they were And the judgment of men killed them, right. not the judgment of their own souls or the judgment of Eternal God.

Consequently, their real tragedy is that they are unfaithful to the greater unwritten morality, which would have bidden Anna Karenina be patient and wait until she, by virtue of greater right, could take what she needed from society; would have bidden Vronsky detach himself from the system, become an individual, creating a new colony of morality with Anna (Ph 420).

133

Certainly Ursula's decision, at the end of The Rainbow

be patient and to await "the man
[who]

to

would come out of

Eternity" reflects the inclusion in his own art of the

alternative Lawrence offers to Tolstoi's Anna; and just as

certainly Birkin's resignation from his post as school inspector, along

v/orld"
v.'ith

his attempt to create "a whole other

(WL 354)

with Ursula, reflects Lawrence's demand

that Vronsky "detach himself from the system, become an

individual, creating,

new colony of morality."

Yet Lawrence himself realized the difficulty of these

tasks, and even his own hero-spokesman Birkin is unable to

accomplish them.

Birkin's dreams of establishing a lastof.

ing relationsliip between man and man,

"being really
a

happy with some few other people," of constructing

new

community to replace the contemporary Sodom, are not,

finally, fulfilled.

Furthermore, the original Vronsky

figure is even more poignantly adapted by Lawrence in the

character of the doomed Gerald Critch, whose misuse of the

red mare at the train crossing echoes the scene in Anna
K arenina of

Vronsky riding his mare to death at the races.

a

Birkin, then, is

most effective character

--

consid-

ering the role he is assigned.

He has above all, perhaps,

the character of a man who stands for freedom but is not

quite sure

i.vhere

to find it.

As a presenter of theoretical
a

issues and tentative solutions, Birkin is

bodiless, static

kind of character

--

E.

M.

Forster

v^;ould

have called him

134

"flat."

Birkin's metaphysical speculations are never

affected deeply by anyone in the novel, and he thereby

becomes
a

rather static bundle of ideas.

The running argu-

ment between Rupert and Ursula about the meaning of love,

for example,
is

apparently supposed to result in some sort

of compromise, a situation which would require a change of

mood in the intractably dogmatic Birkin.

It

is

difficult
is

to see that their final understanding, however,

anything

but a capitulation on Ursula's part.

of the novel
ideas
-[IVL

(In fact, by the end

429]

we find her expounding the same

about the priority of the individual to love --

she had earlier disputed.)

Aside from the fact that he

agrees to use the word "love" (because he is "tired"),

Birkin undergoes no significant change in character or in

doctrine
Birkin's internal flexibility, on the other hand, which
I

have discussed above, raises him above definition as an

idea or set of ideas, and provides his most striking mo-

ments in the novel.

It

is

important to remember the pattern

Birkin's self -conflict is

of conflict outlined earlier.

dramatized primarily by his conflict with Hermione, who represents both the kind of existence he is rebelling against
and the mode of living to which he is closest.

Hermione
it,
is

's

sin, as both Rupert and the narrator see

an inability to respond to the world with anything

13!

other

tlian

her conscious lulnJ:

"She was a woman of the

new school, full of intellectuality and heavy, nerve-worn

with consciousness" (WL 10)

most negative adaptatiji^f
'""

She is
tlie

tlie

most severe and

Sue Bridehead figure Law-

rence ever attempted,

27

'

and she represents an extreme,

decadent culmination of the character type we have seen in

Mrs. Morel, Miriam, and Anna.

Hermione and Rupert have been intimate acquaintances

for a long time and, as the story begins, Birkin is attempting (even before he meets Ursula) to break off his relation-

ship with Hermione, who

he says has "no sensual body of

life" and who cannot therefore provide for either herself

or her lover "the paradisal entry into pure,
(

single being"

WL 247).

fiermione is not only an emblem of Birkin's prea

vious way of life, she is also

representative of the past

Her

and of the dying civilization of contemporary England.

country home at Breadalby

is

symbol of an extinct way of

life based on the past, which denies both life and spon-

taneity to the present.

"Tliere seemed a magic circle drav-zn

about the place, shutting out the present, enclosing the

delightful, precious past, trees and deer and silence, like

a

dream," thinks Ursula pleasantly, but she is soon horri. . .

fied by the stale, "saurian

primeval

vsrorld

of

Breadalby, whose inhabitants remind Gudrun of great reptiles

long extinct, and Birkin of figures in some Egyptian tomb.

Here life is reduced to "a game of chess," where all is

136

known and mechanical (WL 92).

As "priestess"
i\[L

(WL 83)

and

keeper of this obsolescent zoo

94),

llcrmione

repre-

sents the state of mental consciousness which is unattached

to any spark of life or being
in the

(which Lawrence so deplores

It

fourth chapter of the Hardy study).

is

interest-

ing to note t]\at Rupert is her peer in "this ruthless

mental pressure, this powerful, consuming, destructive

mentality that emanated from Joshua and Hermionc and Birkin

and dominated the rest" (WL 83).

From this essential con-

nection of mentality, it is evident that Birkin's subsequent break with Hermione is also a break with his own past.

Furthermore, each of the characters at Breadalby is

judged by his attitude toward the past.

Those who treasure

\

and defend the past are described as stiff, wooden crea-

tures

and as primeval reptiles.

The Brangwen girls and

Birkin alone survive this imagistic condemnation, although

later in the novel Gudrun and Loerke continue the theme of
the past as a "sentimental marionette show" of little or

no value to the present.

'\

In fact,

as David J.

Gordon

points out, in the latter part of the novel "Loerke has

taken over the functions of Hermione'" ? 8 continuing her
sense of a nrofound and life -denying inner emptiness.

Loerke,

v;ho

has been persuasively compared to Dostoev-

sky's Svidrigaylov, 29 is both a caricatureajaipersonifica-

tion of evil.

As Gerald Ford points out

,I

Loerke

'

si

name

137

derives from Loki

whom William Morris describes in Sigurd

the Vol^sung as "the World's Begrudger, who maketh all labor

/ 30 vainl^^,-

In the Norse

sagas, Loki is a combination of the

"His gifts to the first human

Devi^l,^

Cain, and Proteus:

pair were desires, longings, passions.

ning,
fickle,

...

He was cun-

foul-mouthed, jealous,
a

mischief-maker,

slanderous, and

thief.

He transformed himself into a

bird, flea, fly, giantess, mare, milk-maid, salmon, seal

. . .

He slew his brother and is the analog of Cain."

31

Like Hermione, Loerke fears the passage of time and tries

to deny the future by the force of his will
(WL 91,

444).

This denial of passing time and time to come, in which

Gudrun also participates, is

denial of what Mark Schorer

(that inte-

calls the "historical embodiment" of "'Being'

gration of the total self which is life)." 32

the novel, the organic,

Throughout

life-bearing forces of being are

in conflict with the death-dealing forces of the will which

deny the organic dimension of passing time.

Hermione is

surpassed only by Loerke in her addiction to the pleasures

and powers of the will.
For both characters, everything,

even happiness itself, is "a matter of will" (WL 288).

Loerke
's

protean appearance suggests his lack of any

"center of being" or, perhaps, his lack of any real being

at all.

This epicene artist is described (within two

a

pages!) as

magpie, arab

gnome,
a

small boy, old man,

rabbit, troll, bat, bird, and

dog (WL 412-413).

Later

138

he is described as a flea,
a seal.

a snake,

an elf,

pixie, and
in

This last transformation is most revealing,

,

that it is the central symbol of Loki

who is the only

As a seal,

mythological deity to assume that form.

Loki

and Loerke become gods of the frozen north and emblems of

the process of artic dissolution in which, according to

Rupert Birkin, the whole of Western civilization is involved.

Furthermore, the image of Loerke as a seal is one of

a

number of imagistic links which connect him to Gerald.

from the river, after search-

In "Waterparty ," Gerald emerges

ing unsuccessfully for his drowned sister, in Loki's unique

guise:
lie

"He looked like a seal.

He looked like a seal as

took hold of the side of the boat.

...

He sat slack

and motionless in the boat, his head blunt and blind like
a

seal's, his whole appearance inhuman, unknowing" (WL 175).

The similarities between Loerke and Gerald are striking,

and it appears that the former is an extreme portrait of

one aspect of the latter.

Gerald's inhuman mistreatment

of the liorse at the railway crossing is recalled by

Loerke

's

similarly brutal treatment of the horse in his

Loerke
's

statuette.
part of
a

assertion that his horse is only "a

[having] no relation to anything

work of art,

outside that work of art (WL 420) is the aesthetic formulation of Gerald's view that the mare he has tortured at the
railvs?ay

crossing exists only "for my use" (WL 130)

Both

139

men use animals

(and people)

as means rather than as ends

and assign value to beings in proportion to the ease with

which that being fits into their "work."

Loerke and Gerald center their lives around work, and
if Gerald is the paradigmatic ruler of the industrial world,

Loerke is its leading artist:

"The machinery and the acts

of labor are extremely, maddeningly beautiful," says

Loerke, who enjoins man to enjoy "the mechanical motion of

his own body," and d.eclares there is "nothing but work" in
the meaningful life
a
(WL_

414-415).

Like Gerald,

Loerke is

"high priest" of the "god of the machine" (WL 223, 415),

who rules over life subjected "to pure mathematical princi-

ples."

We have previously seen this same kind of subjection

of the body and soul to the machine in Tom Brangwen, Jr.,

of The Rainbow

who,

like Gerald, defines men by their

function (above, Chapter III, pt. Ill),

xvith Loerke

Gerald agrees
"As a man

that value and usefulness are one:

does it cut well?

as of a knife:

Nothing else mattered"

(WL 215).

The primal impulse for the mechanical religion of

Loerke and Gerald is the individual will, whose primary

function is to acquire and assert power and control.

UTien

Loerke tells Gudrun of how he slapped his model for Lady

Godiva into submission, Gudrun gives him the same look of

"supplication, almost slave-like," that she gives Gerald

Vvfhen

he digs his spurs into the mare's side at the railway

140

crossing.

Gudrun is attracted by the power of their wills,

and both men strive above all for the pure fulfillment of

their own will against "the resistant Matter of the earth"

(WL 220)

Thus Loerke is not only an extension of the forces

introduced by Hermione, he also extends and reveals many

of the forces at work within Gerald Critch.
In

fact,

Loerke

seems to encompass all of the kinds of evil we see in the

novel.

As the sexually perverted, willful, machine-worshiper -!

-.

ping German, he is the most clearly daemonic^force in the

novel.
He owes his strength as a novelistic character,

however, to Gerald, whom he both extends

and interprets.

(into abstraction)

Loerke is an effective character because

he portrays a kind of being we have already seen sporadic-

ally in Gerald, and in Gudrun.

Loerke

's

two-dimensional

vileness is protected from lapsing into parody by the fact

that it intensifies the same kind of "daemonical force"
(WL 233)

the portrait of Gerald has presented in a more

complex form.

Gerald Critch is the central character of Women in

Love, and it is in the masterful characterization of him

that this novel becomes most memorable.

an evil and an appealing man,

Gerald is at once

and although he represents

the way of death (as contrasted to Birkin's way of life),

he is always drawn sympathetically as a man of great

141

strengths and great weaknesses.

If the characterizati on

of Birkin is weakened by a continual reliance on expository

monologue, certainly the portrait of Gerald is not.

In

scene after striking scene, the forces which drive Gerald

are rendered in terms of dramatic action -- action which

supports its symbolic meaning

good deal more easily than

do the grandiloquent pronouncements of Birkin.

Gerald

acts out his symbolic parts, whether he is swimming (in "The Diver" chapter)

"like a Nibelung" and a "water god,"

(Loki)

or surfacing like a slick seal

from his desperate

but futile attempt to ward off tragedy from his doomed

family.

Certainly Gerald's subjugation of the red mare

an

at the railway crossing and the rabbit at Shortlands is

excellent translation of the "will to power" into terms of

dramatic action. Nevertheless, it is Rupert Birkin'
s
^'

imagination which

raises Gerald to the level of a symbolic figure and gives

him an importance far beyond that of an egocentric industrial magnate.

as

As

have said before, Rupert sees Gerald

. .
.

"fated, doomed, limited

as

if he were limited to

one form of existence

...

sort of fatal halfness."

Gerald's form of existence centers upon what Lawrence describes in the Hardy study as the later developments in

man

--

the habits of kr.owing and willing

(Ph_

431).

Like

Hermione and Loerke, Gerald is driven by the forces of the

will, and is unable to achieve "pure integral being" either

142

in his self or with otlier selves.

His one successful

attempt to "lapse out" into pure being, as Birkin advises,

is 37,

cut fatally short by the drowning of his sister (WL

170),

Rupert perceives Gerald as

representative of

Occidental man, symbolizing that civilization's inability

to achieve an "organic" wholeness with life
(WL 246)
.

This

failure stems from the life-denying activity of "abstraction

. .
.

destructive knowledge," in

v\'hich

the particular and For Birkin,

the organic and the individual are denied.

Gerald becomes

modern analog to the West African statuThis

ette they had both seen at Halliday's in London.

statuette represents the extreme limit of human sexual experience,

a

metaphysical point in time

tlie

i.n

which "the rela-

tion between

senses and the outspoken mind had broken,

leaving the experience all one sort, mystically sensual

. .
.

knowledge arrested and ending in the senses" (WL 245)

Gerald is the other side of the coin, representing that

metaphysical counterpoint where knowledge is only in the

head, and has no connection with the physical body.
In

this kind of being, even sexuality is a mental activity

and desire is controlled by the will.

to destruction,

Both extremes lead

and "whereas the West Africans, controlled

by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been

fulfilled in sun-destruction, the putrescent mystery of

sun-rays," Rupert sees Gerald as

frightful Hermes announc-

ing an end to our Northern, mental culture:

143

He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one

process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow? (WL 246-247)
As a creature doomed to destruction,

Gerald encom-

passes all the "doomed" characters of the book.

Marked by

Cain, he himself acknowledges the inevitability of dis-

asTer in his life:

after Diana's death at the water-party,

Gerald says, "There's one thing about our family, you knov^.
Once anything goes wrong,
--

it can never be put right again

not with us.

a

I've noticed it all my life -- you can't

put

thing right, once it has gone wrong" (WL 176).

Gerald's "family" really includes all the Gerald-types in

the book -- Hermione, Gudrun, Minette, Mr.

Critch, and

Loerke.

For each of these characters, consummation can be

reached only through wilful violence.

They must strike

rather than caress their "beloved," because will dom.inates

desire.
Thus Hermione hitting Birkin with the lapis,

Gudrun slapping Gerald, Minette knifing the young man in

the caf^, Mr.

Critch imprisoning his wife and Loerke beat-

ing his model are all acts of lovers who cannot love.

l^en

Gerald tracks the clay of his father's fresh grave into

Gudrun'
s

bedroom we have, as Mark Schorer says, "love as

35
.

death" (the chapter is entitled "Death and Love")

When

Hermione strikes Birkin in the study at Breadalby, she

144

feels "a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable

satisfaction" (WL 98)

and

tliis

motif of consummation as

destruction continues throughout the novel to be the central image of spiritual death.
At the end, in the Alps,

Gerald feels "the pure zest of satisfaction" as he strangles

Gudrun, and her death is "the apply of his desire" (WL 463)

This is the process of "love

as_

death" resolving itself,

and the tone of inevitability in the novel grows even

stronger as Gudrun "sends" Gerald off to his pathetic suicide in the snow-covered mountains.

And here we have come down to it, to the essential

aesthetic fact about La^vrence

'

characters, toward which

.

he had been pointing since he began Sons and Lovers

Dis-

daining the "traditional form of the novel," which for

Lawrence meant
a

tale about the social interactions of a

number of people (in the manner of Bennett, Galsworthy,

etc.)
,

Lawrence is trying to write about pure being as it

7 fl

exists beneath the trappings of social convention.

he has found only two essential kinds of being, one of

And

which leads to dissolution, and one of which can lead to

integration.
as

The characters, then, become types, at least

far as Lawrence's speculative and prophetic thought

is concerned;

and this aspect of his novels becomes in(In Lady

creasingly important in subsequent novels.

Chatterley's Lover [1928], for instance, it is not the

characters themselves that we care about, but what they

145

stand for; so that the novel becomes an explicit allegory

built on the equally allegorical framework of the seven

seals of the Apocalypse.)

These types of characters are

viewed, as

F.

R.

Leavis puts it, in "a kind of latent drama

37

of fields of force,"

and each scene of the novel is an

attempt to discover the forces operating witliin the unique

field of each individual.
Like the characters in William

Carlos Williams' novels, Lawrence's people "are not fixed

personalities persisting through time, but are flowing

centers of strength, polarizing themselves differently
TO

according to each situation."

Each character adjusts his

"personality" (Ph II, 513) at each encounter with another

person (cf. Gudrun "acting her role," WL 182, 275, 328, 444,
467)
,

and only through an examination of many of these enThe problem is some-

counters can the buried self be known.

what simplified by Lawrence's belief, as he outlined it in

the Hardy study,

that there are only a few "primal impulses,"

and they are shared by all the characters in varying degrees

of strength.
Thus a character like Gudrun, for example, is

easily comprehensible when we understand Gerald and Hermione.

ity,

Although Gudrun has

quite distinctive individual

that individuality seems less important in terms of

the whole novel than the fact that she shares the preoccupa-/

tion of Gerald and others with her own will (WL 437).

Like

Medusa, to whom she is compared, Gudrun'

is her desire

central concern

for mastery over others:

"She wished she

146

were God,

to use

[Gerald]

as

a tool"

(WL^

408).

Gudrun's
(

"unconquerable desire for deep violence against him"

162)

WL

reveals that her affection for Gerald is grounded in

hate rather than in love, although she says that "love is

one way of putting it"
(WL^

163).

(As

Lawrence has empha-

sized time without number in the novels, love and hate are

distinguishable only at the very roots of being.)

The

"type" of forces which drive Gudrun, we know by now, can

lead only to death.
.

IV

There are

good many readers who object to the sim-

plicity of this novel of life against death in which one

kind of character is mysteriously but explicitly destined]
for extinction (WL 470)
and another kind seems
(just as

mysteriously) destined to be able to affirm life and thus

survive.

More unhappily,

large number of critics have

refused to accept the simplicity of these alternatives,

and have gone about trying to explicate Lawrence by con-

fusing the issues.

But the narrator of V/omen in Love tells

us quite directly that the problem is "fatally simple"

(WL 245).

On the one hand,

there are two kinds of destruc-

tion:

the West African sensuality, and the Nordic "frostOn the other hand, there is "the way of free-

knowledge."
dom":

There vras the paradisal entry into pure, single being, the individual soul taking precedence over love and desire for union.

147

stronger than any pangs of emotion, a lovelystate of free proud singleness, which accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields
(WL 247).

-^Whether or not Birkin and Ursula achieve this state of

"pure,

single being" we are not told.

As David Daiches
39 "

has said, "the novel ends on a question,"

which is

exactly right for this novel.

Whether they are discussing

society, the will, or Western man, the essential conflict

between Gerald and Birkin

form (WL 220).

is

that of mechanical vs. organic

Only the organic principles, according to

Birkin and the novel, lead to truth, and organic form has
no end.
As Lawrence says in the Study of Thomas Hardy
,

"whenever art or any expression become perfect, it becomes

a

lie.

For it is only perfect by reason of abstraction

from that context by which and in which it exists as truth"

(Ph 475).

To become abstract about the future,

or even the

present, of Ursula and Rupert would be to lie about them,

so they must be left "in media res," with other problems to face.

Although Wome n in Love does not erect

new world upon

the ashes of the old, neither does it end in complete

apocalypse.

Birkin and Ursula are left squarely in the

middle of what Lawrence seems to believe is the prevailing

human situation in the modern v/orld:

the old forms of life

14

do not work,

and new ones do not appear.

Birkin tells

Ursula that they too, like Gerald and Gudrun, are involved
in "the dark river of dissolution" which leads progres-

sively to the end of human life

(WL^

164).

This process

will lead, says Birkin, to "a new cycle of creation after

--

but not for us.

If it is the end,

then we are of the

end."

A few scenes later, Gudrun and Gerald mock Birkin'

liigh-flown pronouncements
"-- he says he believes that a man and a wife -can go further than any other two beings They can know but where is not explained. each other, heavenly and hellish, but particularly hellish, so perfectly that they go beyond heaven and hell -- into -- there it all breaks down -- into nowhere."

"Into Paradise, he says," laughed Gerald

(WL 282)

The skepticism of Gudrun and Gerald is not only cutting

(Birkin is listening to this conversation), it is also in

a sense

endorsed.

The question raised by this

(by no mean^

untalented) couple is whether any man and woman could

actually achieve such outlandish goals.

In fact,

"what

the entire novel tends to suggest," as Colin Clarke puts

it,

"is that the kind of fulfillment or completeness that

40

Birkin aspires to is both necessary and impossible."

Birkin's most drastic view of things seems finally correct:

in order for "the new world" to come into existence, human

beings as they now exist must be swept away from the face
of the earth.

NOTES

CHAPTER IV

Letters
2

ed.

Moore, pp.

826-27.

1960)

Women in Love (New York: Viking Phoenix edition, viii hereafter cited in text as WL p
. ; .

See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: pp"! 35 -64 for his insightOxford University Press, 1967) ful discussion of kairos ("moments of crisis") as opposed to chronos ("passing time")
,

Cf. Monroe K. Spears' discussion of the expectation of fin du globe common among writers at this time, which accompanied a feeling of historical discontinuity Spears "The feeling was very widesees as central to modernism: spread that World War I marked the end of a major era, if Modernism not of civilization," Di onysus and the City: in Twentieth-Century Poetry (New YorlTi Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 29.
,

A Study of the Scientific In The Early H. G. ^^^ells Bernard Bergonzi explores Romances (Toronto: n.p. 1961) this apocalyptic pessimism in Wells' works of the first decade of the twentieth century.
:

Also cf. the poetic embodiment of the feeling that the wliole human enterprise is likely to end at any moment, or to continue only in some non-human or inhuman mode, in W. B. Yeats' "The Second Coming" -- "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ ./ Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand./ ./ And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" -- and in Ezra Pound's Mauberly which repudiates the whole "botched civilization" of the Western world:
. .

Christ follows Dionysus, Phallic and ambrosial Made way for macerations; Caliban casts out Ariel.

149

"

150

5, '

The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence

p.

182.

Although a good many critics attempt to separate Lawrence the prophet from Lawrence the artist, I suspect this neither can nor should be done. While writers of fiction are (especially after Henry James) often expected to create a heterocosm, a world parallel to but distinct from the "real" one, the late Sir Herbert Read regarded almost tlie v^hole of modern painting and sculpture as an art of prophecy and outcry, "an art of protest -- protest against a barbarous civilization that is indifferent to all spiritual and esthetic values;" Letter to a Young Painter (London: n.p., 1962), p. 64.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 137.
,

See Spears, pp.

9

20-34,

264-65.
(New

Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols p~. York: The Scarecrow Press, 1961) 694
,

IVhen she first sees Gerald, Gudrun says to herself, "His totem is the wolf" (WL 9) and this motif is continued throughout the noveT (WL 154-155, 208, 404). At their arrival in the Alps, GudiFun exclaims, "my God, Jerry, you've done it now" (WL 338), which is perhaps an allusion to "Geri," one of the two wolves who sat at the foot of Odin's throne.
,

And so would C. G. Jung: "Myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul;" all the "mythologized processes of nature are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection." The archetypes are "structural elements of the human psyche in general"; Modern Ntan in Search of a Soul trans. W. S. Dell and C. F. Baynes (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1933), pp. 215-16.
. . .

"Escape from the Circles of Experience: D. H. Lawrence's The Rainb ow as a Modern Bil dungs roman PMLA 78 103. Though this article adeptly identifies the (1963) problems involved in discussing changes in the meaning of experience, it seems ultimately to equivocate the distinction between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms of acquiring wisdom.
, , ,

12

Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann tr. John Oxenford, ed. J\ KT. Moorhead (New York: Everyman's Library, 1951), p. 103.
,

13

151

Mann is ])araphrasing the argument of Schopenhauer's essay, "Transcendent Speculations on Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual," in his own essay entitled "Freud and the Future" [1936] Essays of Three Decades trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947),
, ,

14

p.

311.
"'^New York:

Thomas Seltzer, 1922; pp. 40-41.

(New York,

The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats

19
5

3)

p.

148.
p.

17
1

"Freud and the Future,"

311.

Lawrence seems to agree with Sartre that "existence precedes essence," that man "is what he wills [and] is nothing else but tliat which he makes of himself" ("Existentialism is a Humanism," collected in Walter Kaufmann s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre [New York: The World Publishing Co., 1956J, p. 261). A~^essenger of destruction," as Rupert Birkin calls him, Gerald achieves final self -fulfillment in death.
. .

'

19

T he

Appropriate Form (London: The Athlone Press,

1630.

1964), p. 149.

"Jobes, p.
21

Co

Bui finch's Mythology (New York: Thomas Y. 19T7), p. 899.

Crowell

See my Chap. II, pt, II; and Louis Martz's article, "Portrait of Miriam: A Study in the Design of Sons and Lovers
.

22

"D. H. Lawrence and Women in Love (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), p 2 911:

.

2 3

,"

The Modern Age

24 p.

London: Spearman, 1961; p.

102.

Also see Leavis,

176.
25

See Frank Kermode's discussion of Birkin' s meditations on "the necessary death of England"; Lawrence and the Apocalyptic Types," Critical Quarterly 10 (1968), 21-22.
,

See Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927) 103-08 for Forster's famous discussion pp of "flat". and "round" characters.
,
.

Appropriately, Ursula calls Hermione one of Birkin's "spiritual brides" (WL 298).

2 7

. ,

152

Women in Love and the Laurencean Aesthetic," Twentieth Century Interpretat i ons of WOMEN IN LOVE e d Prentice-Hall, vStephen J. Miko (Englewood Cliffs, N.
,

2 8"

^J

1969), p.

58.
D.

^^Mark Schorer,
p.

H.

Lawrence

(New York:

Dell,

1968),

43.
30

Quoted by Ford, Double Measure

1010.

p.

196.

^""Jobes, p.
32

Schorer, p. 42.

33 Lawrence does rely priThat is, not essentially: marily on statement when he discusses Gerald's past, but he confirms the narrator's assertions about Gerald by continuing the themes of the past in the dramatic action of the present.

My reading of this symbol stands in direct contradiction of those critics, led by Horace Gregory (see Pilgrim of the Apocalypse [New York: Viking, 1933], pp. 45-47) who interpret the African statuette as a symbol of normative value.

'"Women in Love," The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence ^ Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry T. Moore (Norman: UnT-P-^ varsity of Oklahoma Press, 1953), p. 171. \
,

ed.

Lawrence would be in exact agreement with Nikolai Berdyaev, who felt that "too often, to other people, society and civilization man presents his superficial ego, which is capable of various sorts of external communication, but not capable of communion"; Slavery and Freedom trans. R. M. French (New York: Scribners, 1944) p. 25
,
,

37 38

Leavis, p. 232.

J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966) p 323.
,
.

The Novel and the Modern World (Chicago: University Press, ~r?r50), p. Ib"^

39

Riie r of Dissolution. D. H. Lawrence and English Romantrcism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), pT 110.

CHAPTER V
FROM ART TO AXIOM:

LAWRENCE'S LESSER NOVELS

after us, the Savage god Yeats

.

Lawrence's critics are almost unanimous in their

belief that his career as

in Love
.

major novelist ends with Women

Infrequent disclaimers arise in the case of Lady

Chatterley's Lover (1928), but The Lost Gir l (1920),

Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (19 2 3), and The Plumed Se rpent (1926) have rarely found champions.'
them, that is, as novels.
No one defends

There are

good many critics,

on the other hand, who find these books quite interesting

for what they reveal about Lawrence and his theories --

political, spiritual, and ontological

--

and certainly

these last novels are filled with the lore of the cult

Lawrence has come to represent in the popular mind.

Most

critics who examine these booki take the tack originally

determined by
as

F.

R.

Leavis

who examines the lesser novels

In

though they were a kind of spiritual autobiography.

,

the representative case of Aar on's Rod

for example, we

come to the central critical question Leavis asks about

this novel
(and will ask in a similar fashion about the

others):

"What, then, is the nature of the theme that is

153

154

centered in Aaron, and what relation does Aaron bear to

Lawrence himself?""'Since the first question is discussed
it

only in terms of the second,

becomes obvious that, for

Leavis, this book is meaningful primarily when read in

terms of Lawrence's spiritual journey.

Other critics have

followed Leavis' lead, greatly aided by the immense amount

of biographical material collected in Edward Nehls' three-

volume work,

D.

H.

Lawrence:

A Composite Biograph y, pub-

lished in 1957-1959.^
Most recent critics, however, seem to concur with

Eliseo Vivas' demand that criticism of Lawrence's novels

concern itself with the novels and not with the author.
This has been the major trend in Laurentian criticism
since Vivas' D. H. Lawrence:
Art was published in 1960.

The Failure and Triumph of

Although the critics of the

last decade have not always been willing to accept Vivas'

judgment that Lawrence's "body of ideas

of sense and nonsense, when it is not
a

...

is

mixture

mixture of wisdom

and corruption," they have seldom attempted to remove the

novels after IVomen in Love from Vivas' "failure" category.

R.
P.

Draper, for example, declares that "the novels which

follow Women in Love are of unquestionably inferior quality," and labels them "psuedo-novels
.

"

Keith Sagar

echoes this sentiment, describing the same works as

"decidedly inferior."^

H.

M.
,

Daleski says that after

The Rainbow and Women in Love

"Lawrence is no longer con""^

cerned with form in the novel.

Thus we see that both

155

schools of Laurentian critics,

tlie

biographical critics and

the formalists, have few favorable comments to make on the

artistic merit of the later novels.

Whatever Lawrence is

doing in these books, the general consensus runs, he is

not truly writing novels.

After Women in Love

I

Lawrence no longer writes novels,

suspect, because he no longer creates characters with

Or,

any plausible degree. of self-sufficiency.

to put it

another way, Lawrence seems simply unable to create characters

v;ho

have

"life" of their own.

The charge of "a lack

,

of aesthetic distance" is frequently leveled at Aaron's Rod

Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, as well, as Lady Chatterley

Q

and it is not to be denied.

The drift of this charge is

that Lawrence created images of himself in the major characters of the later novels, and that he simply gives those

images his own words and thoughts to use.

ask, are Aaron, Somers of Kangaroo
,

And yet, we may

Kate of The Plumed Scr -

pent

or Mellors of Lady Chatterley really any more "auto-

biographical figures" for Lawrence than was Paul Morel?

And are Lilly of Aaron's Rod (whom Hough calls "Lawrence
the Prophet"), Kangaroo, or Don Ramon and Cipriano of The

Plumed Serpent any more "mouthpieces" or "spokesmen" than

Rupert Birkin?
I

think the answer is no.

The real failure

is not that the characters

are autobiographical, but that

they are only that; that they have no life of their own.

156

All of Lavcrence's best novels depcTid essentially on

character, because they are primarily about human beings

beings "in the in the throes of experiencing other human

palpitating moment."
is

In the

later novels, however, Lawrence

less concerned with the drama of passional experience

than with the psuedo-drama of intellectual debate.

The

as novels become all argument, abstraction and theorizing

if their the characters talk about fascism and socialism as

on sexual happiness essentially and particularly depended

this or that political program.

Aaron's Rod

Kangaroo and

not about T he Plumed Serpent are novels about theories,

people.

It does not

matter so much that these politico--

spiritual theories seem simply absurd to most readers

All good novels can survive bad theories (cf. The Way of

theories of Flesh, which is grounded upon the evolutionary

Lamarck).
The real problem is that the characters are only

no voices talking about abstractions which seem to have

connection with their everyday lives.

Aaron Sisson, for

a example, doesn't really understand when Lilly proposes

totalitarian political order as an answer to man's varied

sexual needs.

Lilly doesn't make this clear to Aaron, and

(Later, of course,

no one makes it clear to the reader.

Lawrence himself rejects the notion.)

on here?

What's really going

are the

Where are we?

V/here, more importantly,

characters?

Where is Richard Somers of Kangaroo at the end

of that novel?

Sailing off to the New World because he can

1S7

make no sense o the Old?

(in The Plumed Serpent )

Or does Kate Leslie's rejection

of the dark, phallic gods of Mexico

signal the end of the New World too?

I

confess that

don't know.

It

is

obvious that the

characters themselves don't know.

Whatever direction they

it does not

are headed in during the novel and at its end,

seem to be

self -motivated one, even when aided by the When the discussion

most obliging suspension of disbelief.

of the theory is finished,

the book's characters seem to

collapse, like abandoned puppets.

It is most

inviting to assert that the characters seem

to suffer most from the imposition of Lawrence's post World

War theories, which differ from his earlier theories in

that they attempt to outline a way of living life rather

than

way of finding it.

In a sense,

Lawrence's best

works ask "How does the good man live his life?"; and the
later,
less successful novels assert "This way!"
a

The later

novels, that is, dramatize an answer rather than

they impose
a

quest:

theory on life by imposing

certain life on

their characters.

In contrast, we know in Women in Love

that it is Rupert Birkin who rejects the kind of "natural"

relationship to Ursula which is dramatized in the "Mino"

chapter'
it
is

Birkin who is bewildered by the failure of

But in the

his own proposed blutb ruder shaft with Gerald.

subsequent novels, it is not the characters who reject (or

even accept) abstractions:
it is Lawrence.

158

will not belabor this study witli

prolonged dis-

cussion o the characters (whom Graham Hough describes as

"posturing dummies" Women in Love

,

of the four novels published after

but
,

would like to speak briefly about Lady

v/hich is

Chatterley's Lover
fourth best novel.

widely accepted as La\\rrence's

Lady Chatterley certainly seems an

,

artistically logical successor to Women in Love

as

it

takes up the old Laurentian theme of achieving fullness of

being on the high road of love.

Like most of the charac-

ters of the later novels, however, the characters of Lady

Chatterley are essentially abstractions.

Mark Schorer's one sentence summary of the book will
recall its basic plot:

"Constance Chatterley, the frus-

trated wife of an aristocratic mine owner who has been

wounded in the war and left paralyzed and impotent, is

drawn to his gamekeeper, the misanthropic son of
a

miner,

becomes pregnant by him, and hopes at the end of the book

to be able to divorce her husband and leave her class for
a

life with the other man."

It soon

becomes evident

that this book is an almost allegorical dramatization of

mechanical vs. organic being

seen in Women in Love):

(a

conflict we have already

Clifford Chatterley, the intel-

lectual, paralyzed industrial magnate, is locked in mortal

combat ivith Mellors, the anti-intellectual, pastoral gamekeeper.

The prize is Lady Chatterley herself, and an im-

plicit metaphysical victory.

Everything in the novel is

159

polarized; Wragby Hall and the cottage in

like centers of opposite, warring worlds.

tiae

forest are

Tlie

hollow poetry

of the Mall contrasts with the rich, vulgar language of the

wood; the intellectual discussions of sex in the manor are pale substitutes for the nights of passion at Mellors'
cottage.
The love ethic of Sons and Lovers is recalled by

the use of flowers as a center of value:

while Mellors

lovingly entwines forget-me-nots in Connie's maidenhair,

Clifford grotesquely smashes forget-me-nots and bluebells

beneath his mechanical wheelchair.

a

The novel seems almost

catalog of Lawrentian themes and recalls the Adamic tradi-

tion in the Ajnerican novel with which Lawrence was so taken

in his Studies in Classic American Literature
:

the machine

in the garden, Eden invaded by industry, the westering myth

are all blatantly present in Lawrence's last novel.

And

yet, if the novel is more in the American thematic tradition

than in the British, it is more in the Spenserian allegorical tradition than in either.
a

Lady Chatterley's Lover is

highly schematized moral fable of conflict between stereo-

typed characters representing good (Mellors) and evil

(Clifford)
.

This either/or dichotomization of value leaves

us with an unreal world, a world without shading or ambi-

guity, and herein seems to lie the principle weakness of

the novel.
be,

Whatever we conceive the novelistic genre to

12

it is not simply allegory.

160

Mellors and Clifford seem only to define limits of

being; they become personifications, abstractions, ideas

which we can know but cannot feel.

Clifford is, as Barbara

.
.

Hardy puts it, "an assembly of symbolic parts

pre-

sented in an entirely unsympathetic way."

13

Mellors is
a

merely the other side of the metaphysical coin:

concep-

tual collection of symbolic qualities with which the novelist feels sympathy.

There is no human ambiguity in the

there was in Gerald Critch and Rupert

characterization,

as.

Birkin, for example; there is only good or evil, love or

hate.

There is no "quick."
a

Therefore, however

much the

work succeeds as
the machine,

moral fable of the "whole man alive" vs.

it does not quite succeed as a novel because,

as Lawrence has himself told us, we expect more

from the

novel than moral disputation.

What
I

am trying to emphasize is that the failure of

these novels is at least partly, if not primarily, a failure of character.

The central characters either quick-

step to the tune of a politico-spiritual theory (as Aaron,

Kate, and Don Ramon do), or they are suspended immobile

between two theories (as Somers is).

The characters are

never able to affect the theory or the action by their own

presence or being; they never rise above abstraction themselves.

This is the direction, moreover, that Lawrence's

The journey from Sons

art has been moving in all along.

and Lovers to Women in Love might roughly parallel the

161

movement in English literature from Thomas Hardy to Aldous

Huxley.

Lawrence seems to move naturally in his art from

storytelling to metaphysics; the kind of art demonstrated

in an early short story like "Odor of Chrysanthemums" is

replaced by the abstract-symbolistic tone and manner of

late story like "The Man
V/ho

Died."

It

is not

without

significance that when Alfred Knopf first published The

Plumed Serpent
,

it was listed under Lawrence's novels;

T.

"then," as Harry

Moore tells us, "recognizing its generic

-

difficulties, Knopf later classified it officially as belles

lettres
It

14
.

is,

perhaps, ironic that Lawrence saw through all

If we turn again to the

literary pretension, even his own.

Study of Thomas Hardy
,

we

v\rill

see Lawrence unwittingly

describing the future of his own art:

It is the novelists and dramatists who have the hardest task in reconciling their metaphysic, their theory of being and knowing, with their living sense of being. Because a novel is a microcosm, and because man in viewing the universe must view it in the light of a theory, therefore every novel must have the background or the structural skeleton of some theory of being, But the metaphysic must some metaphysic. always subserve the artistic purpose beyond Otherwise the the artist's conscious aim. novel becomes a treatise.

And the danger is, that a man shall make himself a metaphysic to excuse or Indeed, cover his own faults or failure. a. sense of fault or failure. is the usual cause of a man's making himself a metaphysic, to justify himself.

162

Then, having made himself a metaphysic o self- justification or a metaphysic of self-denial, the novelist proceeds to apply the v\rorld to this, instead of applying this to the world (Ph 479).
,

Lawrence goes on in this context to charge that "Tolstoi

is
a

flagrant example of this," and while that is true,

there is probably no greater instance of "the novelist

[who] proceeds to apply the world" to a theory than Lawrence

himself.

Somehow, in the last decade of his life, Lawrence

was unable to infuse his characters with the life, the

"quickness" that he knew was always at the heart of the

artistic novel.
Death of
a

As late as
,

1925, in Reflections on the

Porcupine

he writes of that indescribable magic

a

by which literature endows

character with life:

And if one tries to find out wherein the quickness of the quick lies, it is in a certain weird relationship between that which is quick and -- I don't know; perhaps all the rest of things. It seems to consist in an odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness. That silly iron stove somehow belongs Whereas this thinshanked table doesn t belong. It is a mere disconnected lump, like a cut-off finger.
.
'

And now we see the great, great merits of the novel. It can't exist without being "quick." The ordinary unquick novel, even if it be a best seller, disappears into absolute nothingness, the dead burying their dead with surprising speed. For even the dead like to be tickled. But the next minute, they've forgotten both the tickling and the tickler.
Secondly, the novel contains no didactic absolute. All that is quick, and all that is said and done by the quick, is in some

163

way godly. So that Vronsky's taking Anna Karenina we must count godly, since it is quick. And that Prince in Resurrection following tlie convict girl, we must count dead. The convict train is quick and alive. But that would-be-expiatory Prince is as dead as lumber.
,

The novel itself lays down these laws for us and we spend our time evading them. The man in the novel must be "quick". And this means one thing, among a host of unknown meaning: it means he must have a quick relatedness to all the other things snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, in the novel: the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightening, He must be in quick reand toilet-paper. V.Tiat he says lation to all these things. and does must be relative to them all.l^
,

Lawrence is right about the novel, in spite of himself and

the novels he was writing at the time.

The characters of the later novels probably suffer

most from the overwhelmingly difficult task Lawrence had

set for himself at the end of the Study of Thomas Hardy
:

There shall be the art which recognizes and utters his [man's] own law; there shall be the art which recognizes his own and also the law of v;oman, his neighbour, utters the glad embraces and the struggle between them, and the submission of one; there shall be the art which knows the struggle between the two conflicting laws, and knows the final reconciliation, where both are equal, This is the supreme two-in-one, complete. Some art, which yet remains to be done. men have attempted it, and left us the But it remains to be results of efforts. fully done (Ph 515-516)
.

V/ith

The Rainbow as his Old Testament (Law)

,

and Women in
the later novels

Love representing the New Testament (Love)

164

"supreme art" of seem to be an attempt to construct the which would encom"final reconciliation," a reconciliation nation and the world. pass the home, the community, the
law symbolizes the The rainbow which ends the novel of
dc^nouement of promise of the Old Covenant; the apocalyptic the New Testament. Women in Love reflects the structure of for building a New The novels which follow offer programs

World

is full. new era v^hich is due now that the time first World War were For Lawrence, the horrors of the The 1920s quite literal images and signs of apocalypse. irae," the last were in fact (thought Lawrence) the "dies Man must either remake himself and days of the old epoch.
--

his world or die.

Not content to sit by and describe such The re-

them. critical times, Lawrence tried to redirect

and the characsult was that the novels became treatises The supreme art was never writters became abstractions.
ten,

the final reconciliation never made.

The solution

(or metaphysic),

rather than the art, became supreme.

particuPerhaps, in light of his great difficulties, parents, his wife, his larly his sexual problems (with his
on), Lawrence's refear of his own homosexuality, and so substitution of marks in the Hardy study explain his own

axiom for art in the later novels:

make And the danger is, that a man shall himself a metaphysic to excuse or cover Indeed, a his own faults or failure. =ense of fault or failure is the usual cause of a man's making himself a metaphysic, to justify himself (Ph ^79).

165

It

is

unfortunate, though perhaps unavoidable, that the

insights at which Lawrence arrived in the Study of Thomas

Hardy were forgotten in his later work.

Few writers have

ever known so much about the novel, or so little about

themselves

NOTES

CHAPTER V

Leavis, p. 25.

Madison: University o Wisconsin Press. The central essay using this biographical approach is Harry T. Moore's " The Plumed Serpent Vision and Language," D. H. Lawrence ed. Mark Spilka (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), pp. 61-71. See also Armin Arnold, D. H. Lawrence and America (London: The Linden Press, 195 8) Eliot Fay, Lorenzo in Search of the Sun (New York: Bookman Associates Inc., 1955); Mary Freeman, D. H. Lawrence: A Basic Study of Hi s Ideas (Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, 1955); L. D. Clark, Dark Night of the Body: D. H. Lawrence's "The Plumed Serpent " (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1964J and James C. Cowan, D. H. Lawrence's American Journey (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970).
:

It is obvious that this central precept of "new" criticism has been slow to achieve dominance in Lawrentian scholarship. This is, I think, understandable when one considers the kind of novels Lawrence wrote. The openended form, the great amount of metaphysical and quasimetaphysical discussion, and the quite' noticeable absence of technical precision in all the novels is certainly a great barrier to the critic who prefers "autonomous" art.

Vivas, p.
D.

IX.

1964), p.

H. Lav/rence 88.

(New York: Twayne Publishers,

Inc.,

The Art of D. H.

Lawrence (Cambridge: University

211.

Press,
7

1901)

p.

10 2.

The Forked Flame, p.

166

167

See Lcavis pp. 38-39; Vivas, pp. 37, 39, 46, 51, 69; Draper, pp. 95-96; Hough, pp. 94-95, 112, 137; and Cavitch,
,

p.

182.

The Lost Girl has been labelled "a pot-boiler," and The best discussion generally ignored by the critics. of this work is found in Julian Moynahan's The Deed of
is

Life

pp.
q

121-39.

In Lawrence's letter to Bertrand Russell (dated July 1915), for example, we can easily discern the entire Russell says outline of both Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo that Lav/rence "had developed the whole philosophy of Fascism even before the politicians had thought of it" (The Aut obiography of Bertrand Russell [Boston: Little, don't believe," II, 12J Broivn and Company, 1968J Lawrence wrote, "in democratic control":

26,

fit to elect I think the working man is governors or overseers for his immediate You must circumstances, but for no more. The workutterly revise the electorate. ing man shall elect superiors for the things that concern him immediately, no From the other classes, as they more. rise, shall be elected the higher goverThe thing must culminate in one nors. real head, as every organic thing must -no foolish republics with foolish presidents, but an elected King, something And as the men like Julius Caesar. elect and govern the industrial side of life, so the women must elect and govern And there must be a the domestic side. rising rank of women governors, as of men, culminating in a woman Dictator, of equal authority with the supreme Man. The It isn't bosh, but rational sense. Above all whole thing must be living. there must be no democratic controll -There must that is the worst of all. be an elected aristocracy.
( D. T.

ed. Harry H. Lawrence's Letters to Bertrand Russell Moore [New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1948J p. 54).
, ,

168

For a full discussion o the oneHough, p. 137. dimension characters o Aaron's Rod Kangaro o and The Plumed Serpent see Vivas, pp. 22-35, 37-59,' and 67-72, respectively.
,

Grove Press

'""'""Introduction" to Lady Chatterley's Lover 1957) p. 17.

,

(New York:

'"^At least, not the kind of allegory Lawrence writes. His narrow notion of allegory is revealed by a passage "I hated, even from the first pages of Apocalypse (1932) people having the names of mere as a child, allegory: qualities, like this somebody on a white horse, called A man is more than mere Faith'Faithful and True'. Though as a young man I almost fulness and Truth. had to gulp at his I loved Spenser and his Faerie Queene allegory." Lawrence fails to transcend this limited idea Another way to of allegory in his own Lady Chatterley describe the failure of Lady Chatterley is to say, with Frank Kermode, that Lawrence sacrifices "presence to type" in his use of allegorical images ("Spenser and the Allegorists," Proceedings of the British Academy , 48 [1962], 278).
:

...
.
.

The Appropriate Form, p.

" The

167.
p.

Plumed Serpent

Vision and Language,"

,

61.

ed. Warren Roberts and "'"Collected in Phoenix II Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 420.

A SELECTED BIBLIOGMPIIY

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Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. "The Marble and the Statue: The Exploratory Imagination of D. H. Lawrence," Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists Honour of John Butt ed. Maynard Mack and Tan Gregor. London: Methuen, 1968, pp. 371-418.

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of "The Rainbow ." Engiewood Cliffs, N. J.: PrenticeHall, 1970.
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'

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H.
T.

Harry

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*

Lawrence, D. H. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. with intr. by Vivian de Sola Pmto and Uarren Roberts. 2 Vols. New York: Viking Press, 1964, Lawrence, D. H. The Complete Short Stories London: Heinemann, 19 56.
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1932

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\
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Tindall, William York. D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow New York: Columbia University Press, 1939.
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"Tolstoy, Lawrence, and Tragedy." 25 (1963), 633-650.

Yeats, W. B. The Autobiography of William But ler Yeats. New York, 1953.

180

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,

Lawrence

New York: Longmans, Green

D.

Yudhishtar. Conflict in the Novels of New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969.

H.

Lawrence

Zytaruk, George. "D. H. Lawrence's Reading of Russian Literature." The D. fl. Lawrence Review 2 (Summer 120-137. 1969)
,
,

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Donald Roger Eastman III was born July 25, 1945, at

Langley Field, Virginia.
He was graduated from the City In March,

High School of McMinnville, Tennessee, in 1963.

1968, he received the Bachelor of Arts degree from the

University of Tennessee.

In the

fall of 1968 he entered

the Ph.D. program at the University of Florida on a three-

year NDEA Title IV fellowship.

In December of 1971 he

received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the Uni-

versity of Florida.

181

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

(>.-^^ t

/d<.

c<_^C^

Ward Hellstrom, Chairman Associate Professor of English

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

1^1 C(ij<(h
Ants Oras Professor of English
I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

JVdith M. Levy
isistant Profes^sor of P^chiatry
I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

^.

^i^

Carl A. Bl-edahl Assistant Professor of English

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Kj-j(i(i ^'L^
David R. Rebmann Assistant Professor of English

This dissertation was submitted to the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences and to the Graduate Council, and was accepted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,

December, 1971

Dean,

Graduate School

i.--^^^